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SIX SEASONS ""^^ 

ON OUR PRAIRIES 



Six Weeks in our Rockies. 



THOMAS J. JENKINS, 

OF THE DIOCESE OF LOUISVILLE. 



PUBLISHED BY 

CHAS. A. ROGERS, 

167 West Jefferson Street, Louisville, Ky. 

1884. 



/ 



SIX SEASONS 



ON OUR PRAIRIES 



Six Weeks in our Rockies, 



THOMAS J, JENKINS, . 



OF THE DIOCESE OF LOUIS \'ILLE. 



„ MAY 20 1884 '„ 



PUBLISHED BY 

CHAS. A. ROGERS. 



'o'^""^'^:^^u^'^ 



167 West Jefferson Street, Louisville, Ky. 

1SS4. 



■Jsz 



Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1SS4, 
By Thop. J. Jenkins. 



Knoefel, Berne & Co., Printer?, 
210 Market St., Louisville, Ky. 



TO THE 

EVER-VIRGIN QUEEN MARY, 

Immaculate and First Patroness of these States, whose Dower is the 

WHOLE NEW WORLD, 

And by Excellence, the Best it Contains in the 

NORTHERN FR^IRIB VALLEY, 

Watered by her own "River of the Immaculate Conception,'' 

And Bounded, towards the Setting Sun, by the 

WALLS OF OUR ROCKY MOUNTAINS, 

Inlaid with Gold, Silver, and Precious Stones, 
Emblematic all of what we would offer 
OUR ONLY QUEEN, 
This Slight Attempt to Mirror Forth 
HER VIRGIN LANDS, is Dedi- 
cated, with all the Effusion 
of his Heart and with all 
the Ardor of his Inmost 
Soul, by her forever 
Devoted Client, 
THE Author. 
May, 
1SS4. 



Six Seasons on our Prairies: 

A DIARY. 



Six Seasons on our Prairies, 



A PREFATORY MAY. 




^T(|)T-WAS on the first of May. in the year of grace 
'^^^j^iSSz, we three — a practical Irish Kentucky 
I farmer, his sturdy son, a young man of good, 
hard sense, and an aihng ecclesiastic — started 
to travel North and West by the circuitous but 
interesting route, across Southern Indiana and 
Illinois, and from St. Louis by water to the other 
saintly city in Minnesota. We went sight-seeing and 
health-seeking, as well as on business intent, to secure 
personal knowledge of prairie farming, by "doing" 
the Northwestern Catholic Colonies — with possible 
and probable choice of new homes for some families 
who were wearing out both patience and good Irish 
and American muscle on Middle- Kentucky farms 
lying back from the Ohio, and cut oft' from railroad 
lines. The agitation for the migration of Catholics 
from the crowded cities East, and the poorer agricul- 
tural districts South, was inaugurated fourteen or fif- 
teen years ago. The plan was carried into execution 
beyond the Mississippi River, so that we find a more 
or less connected system of plantings scattered in 
every State bordering its western banks. Practical 
laymen have joined hands with practical prelates all 



8 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

along the line, and Catholics find themselves pro- 
vided with resources to place families with moderate 
means, and no good establishment where they live 
or come from, to people the glorious West, and 
take possession of their God-given inheritance. 
Deus fac sit I For ourselves, we did not get ofF 
without some difficulty. Embarking rather late in 
the day we boarded the wrong boat on the Ohio to 
make rail connections on the other shore. Here 
we were separated by some misunderstanding — two 
of us finally bunking on the floor of the state-room- 
less craft all night, as it made its regular or rather 
irregular trips. Mishap No. i. Mishap No. 2 fol- 
lows on its heels. We united next morning, and 
moved on towards St. Louis — to be caught on the 
way by a furious hail-storm, that made the car-top 
and windows rattle like musketry, as we neared the 
big city of the Father of Waters. The place, strange 
to us, we booked in the Planter House — imposing 
enough when you were inside the colonnaded office. 
We were shown to a room with three beds, the 
lights smashed by the hail, and scattered glass and 
ice all over the floor. When we came to pay our 
bill, and the clerk coolly informed us it was nine 
dollars for a nighf s lodging alone, we looked from 
one to the other in amazement, but after demurring, 
paid him the outrageous charge. He didn't know 
par example^ that one of the costliest boats on the 
Ohio — the unfortunate "Pat. Cleburne" — had been 
blown up for charging one of us somewhere about 
eight or nine dollars too much for carriage. He was 
innocent — that Planter House clerk. It was not two, 
at most three, months afterwards, when the Planter 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 9 

concern was burned to the ground, with a great loss, 
uninsured. And w^e assure the suspicious that we 
caused neither catastrophe, but considered both as 
providential retribution, sure to overtake those per- 
sisting in legalizable theft. 

May the 9th, and we had steamed up the ever 
more beautiful Northern Mississippi, noting par- 
ticularly the thriftier towns and cities on the West- 
ern prairie side, the fresher air, the limpider water, 
the painted rocks, and realizing how poetic and 
true was the Catholic instinct that named this upper 
continental stream the "Immaculate Conception." 
Hail, spirits of heroic priests and men! We other 
Catholic wayfarers salute you with reverential love 
as we pass. 

Our tarry in and about St. Paul was short. We 
had come for everything but big cities and grand 
buildings. We moved westward. 

I will admonish the reader that tho' the writer 
was, the whole three seasons in the prosperous year 
of 1882, traveling on the prairies, as well as during 
the corresponding time of which a diary follows in 
1883, no detailed account of the first half of these 
six seasons was* kept. The account of one set of 
seasons will answer for the other, and 1882 will be 
noticed only supplementarily, and as occasions recall 
it, except the relation of this month of May. 

We found it cool — cold to our Southern blood; 
and woe to him who had come unprovided with his 
overcoat — as one of us had! It was a constant 
source of fun for us two, and occasional shivering 
and self-reproach to him. 

Takinsf the Northwestern route from St. Paul on 



lO SIX SEASONS ON OUK PRAIRIES. 

the way to Graceville, Minn., on the borders of Mid- 
dle Dakota, we were not favorably impressed with 
the wisdom of the projectors of the way towns. 
Following the railroad strictly many of the villages 
and more pretentious places were built in sloughy 
situations, and had to have their streets mounded to 
keep somewhat out of the water. 

Much of the country contiguous to the older 
Catholic foundations of colonies, in Swift and ad- 
joining counties at, for instance, Waverly, De Graft', 
Clontarf, and further north, on examination, proved 
to be generally good, if well selected; though tracts 
are found more or less marshy. Sections can be 
picked, which, with drainage by ditching or tiling, 
make good farms and fine crops. Some such I al- 
ready saw in tillage, and of fine records. It is con- 
siderably similar to Northern Illinois, some ninety or 
one hundred miles south of Chicago. New selec- 
tions have been made at Adrian, Minneota, and 
southward. 

To Minneota, Rev. Fr. Cornells, the former pas- 
tor, has just brought from his native land one hun- 
dred new families of Belgians, mostly farmers. So 
successful in their own garden country of Europe, 
they are sure to succeed on these prairies. 

Graceville — named after the present venerable 
second Bishop of St. Paul — Rt. Rev. Thomas L. 
Grace, O. P. D. D. — is a rising town, and surrounded 
by perhaps a better country than is met east or- 
southeast in Minnesota. Communities of this kind 
are left to their own resources, and are not "boomed" 
like numerous localities — in fact, the whole of the 
region west. It has attracted, however, some two 
hundred families in a moderate radius; and the vil- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. II 

lage boasts of goodly rows of houses, a large mill 
and general stores. There is a belt of natural timber 
three-quarters of a mile from town, of large trees of 
various kinds — a resource for firewood not often 
attainable on the prairie from the Dakota line, as far 
east and south as Swift County, Minn. Outside 
the great pineries of the North, which cover, with 
other wooded portions, one-third of the area of the 
State; and the "Big Woods" of some thirty varieties 
of timber, and containing, in its breadth of forty 
miles, and length of upwards of one hundred, 5,000 
square miles, wood is scarce, except about the 
larger lakes. 

Spring ploughing and planting were going on 
actively in the middle of May here and in South- 
western Minnesota; tho' as shall be remarked, there 
is a difference of from fifteen to twenty days in the 
maturing, as in the earlier planting, of crops as com- 
pared with the wooded regions in Southeastern 
Minnesota. 

Of game there was all abundance. We kept our 
table well supplied with plover, jack-rabbits, snipe 
and other varieties of smaller game. We chased a 
rabbit one day, looking fully as large as an ordinary 
dog, but caught — only a good glimpse of him, nota- 
bly his uplifted cotton tail. 

Towards the middle of the month we shifted our 
headquarters to Avoca, Minn., and came into the 
• charmino: resfion detailfullv described, in all its 
moods and phases, in the Diary of 1S83. 

This Diary embodies my diurnal and nocturnal 
experiences, not only, tho' mainly, in the ''Land of 
Sky-tinted Waters," but also excursions into Iowa, 



13 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PKAIItlES. 

West and East; Dakota; Nebraska thro' its whole 
length; Wyoming's southern corner; the "•Rockies" 
in Colorado. It does not forget general items of 
Catholic, mineral and agricultural interests in Mon- 
tana, Idaho, Nevada, New Alexico; and winds up 
with comparisons of the States lying on both sides 
of the Mississippi Valley. 

If descriptions seem to crowd the early months 
and the latest, the reader will be the more astonished 
that Nature is so various and interesting on \vhat are 
esteemed as flat, dull, prairie lands. And Nature's, 
because God's remedies, are prescribed for ills of mind 
and body. The Diary's range precludes the idea 
of its bein.g classed with what I at least ignore — 
special booming campaign papers; does not, how- 
ever, disdain to tell all the inviting truth it can lay 
hold on, and where proper, give details worth know- 
ing to projecting movers, to enable them to judge 
for themselves when they come to examine localities 
for future homes. Finally, I believe and confess, 
with Mr. John Sweetman, the experienced and can- 
did author of ''Recent Experiences in the Coloniza- 
tion of Irish Families," that it is as well — nay just — 
to show some of both sides of the practical settling 
of Catholic or other families on our Western 
prairies. A man and a priest need not stick at 
acknowledging a few palpable disadvantages, and 
predicting the certain disappointments of too gold- 
en dreamers. ''Forew^arned is forearmed" — still the , 
good w^ill prevail, like Truth — and here is proof of it. 



Diary of the Seaso-ns of 1883, 




AvocA, Minnesota, June 6th, 1883. 
r/iHY not ? It can be vain — it's useful, and, 
[gone day, interesting. And to store up facts 
and observations for a future period! My 
friends, too, hovs^ sv^^eet for them ! Then on, 
Auspice Maria! Let's mirror the Virgin 
Lands. City Diaries? What? Musty, dusty, 
great cities. Aw^ay v^ith the necessary evils! Now^ 
for the necessary good. Walls are manufactured — 
towns built by men — God made the fields and '^their 
beauty is with him." They are temples "made 
without hands" — God-made. The best is not the 
rare — contrariwise. The best beautiful is cheap, 
common for all. Men! make but a pond in imita- 
tion of that Lake St. Ro&e. Paint but a feather in 
semblance of this poor bird's that clings to my fingers 
from the hunt. The undefiled — alas ! except it all 
be sin-tainted — is here over the ocean of the prairie, 
in the changeful face of the waters and the sky. I 
repeat: "God made the country^man made the 
town:" or, as some will have it, it was the old 
enemy made the town. 

Just two weeks to-day! Ah! what a long day 

since I came. Night has at last been dissolving 

under the influence of this pure air of heaven, the 

balmv breezes, the sweet sunshine. I have begun 

•to sleep. "Ho!" said the housekeeper, "father, it's 



14 SIX SEASONS ON OUll PKAIRIES 

after seven by this clock." I was conscious enough to 
respond: "Oh! your clock is too fast." I feel sleepy 
in the day, after my hearty meals. After-dinner 
nap — I'm afraid, bah! I'm not afraid either, why not 
be glad? — will be the order of commencing the 
evening properly. Repose, I have lost plenty ! 
aye, superabundance, and I'm going to make it up 
this summer, please God. Besides, the days are so 
long — ^just think, from 4.22 to 7.38, fifteen hours, 
sixteen minutes; nay, over seventeen hours of dayr 
light, including the two hours' twilight. The half 
moon hangs out her silver lamp and the stars fade. 

yune \^th. — That was a prefatial plea in advance 
for a longer sleep this morning; ahem! arose at 
7 o'clock whistle. Let's put it on the storm and the 
pup that pawed the door open. I heard him leis- 
urely scratching himself beside my couch at some- 
thing near 4 A. M., and drove him out with my 
boot. 

Moore might extenuate, paraphrastically: 

■'The best of all waj^s to shorten long days, 
Is to lengthen the hours of the night." 

M. W. Spring, of the University of Liege's, Pop- 
ular Science Monthly article, "On the Colors of 
Water," might be illustrated in the lakes of this re- 
gion, notably St. Rose's. Its face changes like the 
human physiognomy — all depends upon its mood. 
When very angry or placidly calm, its color is dark 
blue, almost purple. In medium, undecided weather, 
its cast is more inclined to earthy, a brownish red. 
But curious to say, when the main body is reddish, 
the slough beyond the railroad bridge and mound 
appears deep, beautiful blue. I will watch this. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I5 

The sky influences as much as the lake bottom, and 
the season agahi makes remarkable differences. The 
water now appears in se, of a light brownish tinge, 
except on the pebbles. 

White Bear Lake, Minnesota. 

yune i^th. — Curious, how this rainy, falling day 
should make sunshine within and bring me back 
those unparalleled days of first delighted experience 
in this crystal climate — when it wants to be crystal. 
White Bear Lake, twelve miles east of St. Paul, 
commands some eighteen miles of shore and is 
diversified by not only the now smooth, now as- 
cending banks on inlet and bay; but far off' to the 
northern end is dignified with a promontory of 
uncommon beauty and pleasant surprise. Across 
the causeway, too, is a secluded offing where grow 
the yellow and white waterlily, the former rather 
indelicate, but the latter approaching the exquisite- 
ness of the night-blooming Cereus. We would stoop 
and reach down low into the water to catch the 
stem long, and detach it from its vase-like socket. 
These and wild roses, meadow sweet, larkspurs, 
and baybells mingled their sweets about our Lady's 
feet in the May services. How many and varied in 
form, hue and scent, the wild flowers on the shores 
about the green avenues of the oft-rifled island: 
Sweet Williams, wild violets and saff'ron blossoms, 
calla lilies, and purple bunches of fragrant lilacs. 
And how vivifying the bevies of joyous youths and 
maidens in their gay summer costumes, culling them 
and sporting in the checkered shades by the beach 
and bluflry outlooks on the occassional stretches of 
lake. 



l6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

When I look back now to last summer, at the per- 
fect days and heavenly nights at "White Bear,'' 
domesticated as I was with the cultivated family 
who made my stay so pleasant, I marvel how I 
could not sleep. I was unstrung indeed. A man 
may laugh at nerves before he discovers he has any; 
but let him hang over the ragged edge of suppressed 
or excited palpitation for a run of tw^elve or fifteen 
niofhts without the break of a solid rest for even four 
hours! And, well — I used to sit in the spring sunlight, 
w^hich makes diamonds on the lake, opals in the sky, 
and emeralds and amethysts on the leaves of the 
wooded shores, and see as distinctly as a crystal in a 
microscope the exact form of the remotest objects 
sharply defined. The large island, with winding 
drives, piled tiers of shaggy trees and lake-lapped, 
was being connected to the main land by an arching, 
balustraded bridge. The shores, down by the music 
balcony and on to Williams' Hotel, were dotted on 
land by the peeping tents and white villas, and 
spacious retired hotels ; w^iile bobbing near the 
ishores, the sailcraft invited you to a scud across the 
bays or out into the deep. The green and red bath 
houses and out-jutting piers formed accompanying 
ground and background for the lounging fishers, 
flapping sails and pleasure hunters. Our moon-lit 
nights out in our swift sailers, with violin and flag- 
eolet or flute, according with the lightsome boat- 
songs or opera snatches, kept young hearts sweet 
and fresh, raised the drooping, rejuvenated the older, 
smoothed the wrinkles of care. 

The inhabitants about White Bear, wdien the 
Aveather is storm v, and the blue waves trembling 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 17 

out in mid-lake, dash up a crest of white foam, say: 
''The Bear is showing his teeth!" How beautiful! 
White Bear, tho', you are aware, is the Indian 
chief's name, who is buried in the fine mound with 
the rustic arbor, made in vacation by an ecclesiast- 
ical student, but naturally utilized by lounging lovers 
as midway station in their round of the lake shore. 

Avoca, June i^th, night. — How w^onderfully var- 
ious have been the past three or four days' sunsets 
across the lake. Monday's w^as an entrancing vis- 
ion, more like the stories of Aladdin's Lamp or 
Mirza's vision — if not even recalling the Revela- 
tions of St. John. What a scene of ecstatic glory, 
calmly sublime! Bars of vivid lightning arrested in 
mid-volley, spread horizontally across the molten 
islands of liquid amber and onyx. The rounded, 
softer contours of the southw^est and north gently 
burned like heaven's cornelians of rich red islands 
of clouded pearl, hillocks of feathery orange, filled 
out the back and upper ground. Away off to the 
horizon's south and north dwelt that indescribable 
peace of suffused pink light. About the sun there 
seemed a living, glorious tabernacle of white and 
rose and gold and precious metals burnished — a long 
island lay spread out of silvered gold "like purest 
glass." "He hath set in them a tabernacle for the 
sun," {David Ps.) and in the midst blazed with 
bearable effulgence the imao^e of the Great Kino- on 
his great white throne, diffusing glory and benedic-^ 
tion for evermore. I gazed and w^as never sated 
with gazing, as the heavenly slides shifted the chang- 
ing revelation, and an inspiration struck me to climb 
the highest point accessible over the lake and see 



l8 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

the mirrored glory in its fair bosom. I saw, and the 
roses bloomed softly confused in the waters' depths, 
a dream of a vision spread beneath, while the glory 
above canopied all. 

John Ruskin's great attraction was the grand- 
iose — mountains, piled clouds, rushing torrents, 
fiery glaciers. I have failed to notice that he has 
any practical idea of plain beauty, simplicity, pas- 
toral picturesqueness alone. Still and all, if he 
had had opportunity to enjoy such a land as this, 
such sky, such water, such air, the very names, 
Minnetonka, "great waters" — Minnesota, "sky- 
tinted waters," would have charmed him. He 
missed something in all his wanderings through 
Europe, Asia, even across the Mediterranean. He 
never saw America, and say what they will, we cer- 
tainly have the most superb natural scenery, with- 
out prescinding from the sublime, at least, in high 
altitudes, the world can show. And one must travel 
far before he will find any parallel with the unique 
enchantment of these western prairies, when an eye 
for the simple works of Nature, the attention ta 
details, the broadest and minutest, are appreciated. 
This land, and its low-voiced, unobtrusive charm, 
puts me in mind of the simple majesty of the word 
of God, whose very most attractive feature is its 
adaptability generally to all minds and all peoples 
and times; which wears well and improves with 
meditation, and palls not on long acquaintance. 
Ruskin's truly aesthetic interpretation of the passages 
from Holy Writ, describing the clouds as indeed 
God's Throne and best manifestation of Himself in 
Nature, came home, and a lofty peace awed my 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I9 

awakened soul. Ezechiel: "'Behold, He cometh 
with clouds and every eye shall see Him." Psalms: 
"Thy Mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy 
faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds. His excel- 
lency is upon Israel and His strength is in the 
clouds." "The heavens declare His righteousness 
and all the people His glory." "Swear not by 
heaven, it is God's throne." 



Tuesday's sunset w\as less beautiful — only orange 
and rose confused in sw'eet disorder, and about the 
north, colder heaps of creamy snow. Again, in the 
east, the slate- colored, elongated islands of solid 
vapor in a sea of greenish blue, and a grand tumb- 
ling of w^'ung-out rain clouds crowding the tops 
and sides of the vault. Wednesday's, finally, with- 
out a cloud; no side scenery, no varied colors, but 
one wide bosom of warm, red-rose lierht, formino- an 
expansible hemisphere of comforting glory — spread- 
ing over the broad prairie and up into the w^estern 
sky; the gold burning ball majestically sinking, 
sinking until the quarter disk, the centre of the half- 
periphery of heaven's Bengal light, seemed to draw:, 
nay, did draw% the heart after it to witness the 
essential glory of which it was but the outward gate. 



June i6th. — Yesterday's and this evening's train, 
bless it! brought my first batches of letters. My 
friends, that God has given me on occasions un- 
looked-for, but determined in his loving Providence, 
these are your self-draw^n photographs, more precious 



20 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

than the very artists', because drawn in the colors of 
the heart. Here more than all does one begin to 
appreciate them, the dear absent. How I have col- 
lected them more carefully and culled them out with 
greater solicitude than any other belonging. 

Friends of mine in every clime, from the village 
friends of first school davs, when we coasted together 
the great maple-tree hill-sides and waded the pure 
rock-bound brook, on thro' school and seminary; in 
Europe at our dear American College, and all thro' 
these near fourteen years of joy-and-sorrow-check- 
ered man's life, friends of unforgotten boyhood; 
clinging hearts of young manhood; brothers-in-arms 
in celestial warfare; sisters more of spirit than flesh, 
sweetest because nearest my heart in God; children- 
friends, to you all, living on earth, blessed in heaven, 
I consecrate this page, only written, but indelible! 
Orate pro me! 

And here they troop to say their little speeches 
before friendship's throne. How kindly my majesty 
inclines towards them and gives a right royally gra- 
cious hearing. "Ah! bless you all, right well! Now 
the 'winter of my discontent, doth thaw quite out in 
the glow of your spring-time faces! Sweet friends, 
glad welcome!" 

And little by little, one comes down, like Joseph, 
from his stateliness and mingles with his brothers 
and sisters — and falling on their necks he weeps for 
joy: "I am Joseph, come nearer to me — I am Joseph, 
your brother." 

Here is many a Benjamin and royal Judah, gen- 
erous Reuben — aye, sometimes, repentant Issachar 
and Zabulon. They will, many a time as now, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 21 

brighten my not unpleasant exile and freshen ties 
never broken. All this gilded climate, new-found 
friends, healthful benefits, would scarce fill the place 
of a tithing of my loved correspondents, from the 
gray-haired brethren in the ministry and sisters 
under the white hood, to the children, known from 
peachen-cheeked girlhood to the age of the 
mother-eye and the purer cap of the religious. 
Again, bless you all well and forever! 

Prairie Sunday. 

Sunday, I'jth. — The week is so quiet and Sabbath- 
like out on these iinpolluted prairies, and the stillness 
of the Sunday is not striking, save for the ghost of 
a holier calm that everywhere is its natural halo. 
Only the little train, gliding almost noiselessly on 
the level track, comes not back and forth; and the 
single piping whistle of the tow-mill, playing tenor 
to the bass of the droning machinery, is hushed. 
But every day here is nearer like the day of the 
Lord's rest than the busy, rushing, city church-going 
and coming, the rattle of the street cars, and screech 
and yell of the locomotives, and the jangling of the 
different-voiced bells of the discordant creeds. 

Avoca, Sunday Forenoon. — Some other friends 
met me on the morning ramble along the lake in the 
much-clouded sunshine that gave the moving, 
glassy surface of St. Rose's the tint of watered blood. 
Who would you guess? One would little expect a 
sportsman — especially only an amateur and mediocre 
"shot," to be a friend of the birds, eh! When such 
cannot get legitimate game, they are apt to shoot for 
fun and slay right and left, what they happen to hit. 
Not so, however. One can love sport, not for the 



22 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

sake of slaying, but. to obtain necessary exercise, 
irreplacable by anything different; to eke out the 
scantier board, and because the fish of the waters 
and birds of the air, as well as the beasts of the field, 
are God-given for food, since the vegetarian diet 
was abolished after the flood in the permission 
accorded divinely to our second father. Familiar 
friends! The cat-bird, with not only his short melo- 
dious calls and fitful phrases, but his flat, soft cat- 
call unmistakable. One struck up his intercalated 
matins for, no doubt, the twentieth, or even fiftieth 
repetition, down at the head of the lake near the 
windmill; and as I sauntered up meditatively along 
the shore to the west, I heard hfs notes sounding 
clear over the half-caw of the multifarious varieties 
of the black-birds, the clang-like notes of the prairie 
lark, the whistle of the hovering plover and the 
minor pipes of the winged mites, chirping, twitter- 
ing along the bushes. 

For a quarter of a mile or more, the pleasant notes 
came borne by a gusting breeze, even sometimes 
piercing past an adverse wind; and I could fairly 
fancy myself in the wooded hills and sweeping vales 
of old Kentucky. The illusion ^vas eked out by the 
frequent passing to and fro of the fan-tailed, flutter- 
ing beemartins; the distant, then nearer, short melody 
of the clearer-throated lark, and the first fitful, then 
swimming, flight of the tawny-breasted black-and- 
yellow bird. Anon, as I lost the last notes of the 
first songster, another set up his music box in the 
bosk of the next lake-jutting, and took upwhere his 
fellow -singer had left ofi'. 

Curious! the matins of the prairie birds continue 
far into the day by reason of the uninterrupted 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 



23 



freshness of the mornings. Here, as the half-past- 
ten church bell calls to last Holy Mass, they chirp 
and chatter, call and quawk, sing singular melodies, 
and the irrepressible cock crows between. 

17/// — Still Sunday. — It has been fuller of inci- 
dents than usual. I got home from up the lake at 
1 1:20 P. M. Up, then up and down the rapid 
little shoots of the inlet stream, around the graceful 
curves in the offings, we glided and threw out the 
troll hooks, spinning in the wake of the boat! 

Houp, first bite! haul in: small pickerel. Second, 
a larger, still another, a half, a whole dozen, in 
something over an hour. The sky continues cloudy; 
the lake dull crimson. A patter of rain. It makes 
the fish crazy for a frolic and food. They shall have 
it — and so shall we! They nab the hooks: we snag 
three, four, by the ribs. They bite away as fast as I 
can throw out the line. Four, five, literally in as 
many minutes. A great cloud lowers over us. In 
the excitement a smart April shower, in June, sur- 
prises us, wets us pretty superficially and hurries us 
up and out, to escape. We wait many a weary hour 
to return to our sport; but no! Rain, rain! I have to 
get home two miles down lake and the northerly 
wind only stops the down patter at 10.30 P. M. 
These April-in-the-middle-of-June showers are not 
so innocuous to catarrhal throats, as I experienced 
for two days afterwards. But oh! that batch of 
seventeen or eighteen fine fish! that pays for all. 

The Little Sleeper of Avoca. 

Monday^ iZth. — Ah! Sweet God of infancy! This 
time brings a sad, suave recollection and anniver- 
sary — the sickness and death of little six-year-old 



24 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Beatrice Aungiers. How it tears the heart to recall 
the mother's softer grief — grief dissolving in tears, 
vet "would not be comforted, for her child is not!" 
How contrasted with the father's sterner, tearless de- 
spondency, ending in his clotting a ball of dirt and 
throwing: it on the lowering- coffin with an iindis- 
tinguishable mutter, almost a curse, at the frenzied 
moment of losing, so long, his first-born. They had 
come from their pleasant yeoman's villa in rural- 
England, ivied, stonewalled. Their three children, 
Beatrice, Laddie and baby Florence, w^ere worried 
by the sea sickness and the usual discomforts of a 
voyage, a fourth 'round the globe; and too, by the 
unpreparedness of prairie hotel life. All drooped. 
Beatrice grew worse, commenced to wither — sweet 
flower of beauty and innocence! wilted, dropped 
her fair young head, like a dead rose on its stem, 
and the sick spirit was gone! 

I saw her but as the lily corpse, a little livid now, 
lay in its white grave-clothes on the great bed over 
the parlor. The sobbing mother led me in; we had 
never seen one another before, but, 

"A fellow-feeling makes all the world akin." 
and hard would be the heart that throbbed not the 
throb of sympathy with a blow such as this. We 
stood beside it. But somehow, a child's remains 
scarcely ever inspire me with grief, and tears dis- 
solve into a bow of light above the sweet — aye, 
sweet in death's cold arms, broken soul's tabernacle. 

I smiled at the sleeper of Avoca, and thought of 
the daughter of Jairus. In whiter robe we wound 
her, in tiny cream coffin; and tho' something moved 
to show of grief, we made her funeral and its touch- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 2^ 

ing circumstances like only the bearing of the little 
virgin martyr, sweet smiling in death, away from 
the amphitheatre of horror to the calm and holy 
catacombs. Only it had rained, and the poor grave 
was filled with mud and water; and oh I it hurt so 
to put that body in so foul a resting place. God 
heal smarting hearts! what a proof of the curse of 
sin even over the personally sinless, yet inheriting, 
fruit of sinful womb. 

With deeper sorrow we laid her low; but then we 
had only sown a grain in God's Acre on the prairies, 
to be a ripe blessing on this colony and sanctify the 
soil for the future dead and the present living. 

How I recall afterwards that the merciful God 
vouchsafed the life of baby Florence, sick unto 
death, thro' the intervention of our Lady of Lourdes; 
v^^e consecrating the child to God and promising her 
full retirement from the world, with her discretion- 
ary consent. She lives now, a very darling, a little 
browned, but rosy-cheeked, sweet-eyed and chest- 
nut-haired — fast filling the gone Beatrice's place and 
helping in her child's and artless way to nurse little 
Francis Eric, our God-son — sent some months later 
literally to refill the number at the fond mother's 
knee! Aye, Beatrice! well named, like the angels 
of God, sleep on with thy comrades of Avoca grave- 
yard, little John and the two baby Catharines — lost 

babes. 

"Thy lovely companions 
Are faded and gone ... 
I'll not leave, thou lone one, 

To pine on the stem ; 
Since the lovely are sleeping, 

Go, sleep thou with them!" 



26 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

1 8/7/ — Evening. — There are sudden gusts of wind, 
some showers, pretty sharp claps of thunder, re- 
sembhng our Middle States end of April or begin- 
ning of May. The birds do not seem to mind the 
weather. I hear them singing away. 

Rt. Rev. Dr! Ireland visits us, principally to look 
after the Nuns of the Holy Child, who have come 
to take charge of an academy and parochial school 
at Avoca — much needed in these parts and destined 
to be the seminary of future branch houses through- 
out southern Minnesota, and maybe in neighboring 
States. God prosper them, and His cause is theirs! 

Tuesday, \<^tk. — What a faultless day has this 
been! From the early sunrise, the first I have seen 
this season, until the late set, there has been scarcely 
the slightest fleck in the pale sunshiny sky; except 
now, at the last moments, a filmy veil of cloud has 
gathered over the western horizon to catch and 
embody the fine red light streaming over air and 
earth and sky. 

Is it presumptuous to say this hyacin thine, spot- 
less heaven, with its brilliant sun in the midst, like 
Gods' own Kohinoor, is the worthy bridal ring of 
the Maker's marriage with His unstained Virgin 
Earth! And the harmonies that have been playing 
in the air from the winds, sweet harpers, harping 
on all Nature's yEolian harps; mingling with the 
sonorous hum of gratitude from man and beast and 
bird, are all but the echo of the sweeter symphonies 
Earth's Angels have been harping all the day long! 

And a worthy, calmly beautiful night has com- 
menced to drop her curtain, ever so silently, in the 
south and east, thro' which shines in her moony 
sheen the full orb. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 27 

Here and there a few diminished stars pulse, teebly 
twinkhng on the bosom of ether, but far removed 
from the Great White Throne of their earth-wedded 
queen. A greenish brightness still lingers on the 
upper edge of the light bank of vapors that shade 
off the path of the down-going of this day's sun. 
Blessed be God! "Holy in all His works, and won- 
derful in the heights!'' 

He has compensated for the simplicity of His 
Virgin Mother's prairie inheritance by the glories of 
the sky above it by day, and the quieter beauty of 
the nightly firmament. 



Avoca, yune 20th. — Two hunts, one fruitful of 
naught but exercise and giving a long ramble, mus- 
ing along the great slough; another of an hour, 
dropping five birds and a mallard. They supplied 
our ecclesiastical supper for three priests and the Rt. 
Rev. Bishop. 

Dr. Ireland opened the convent chapel to-day by 
celebrating the first Holy Mass in St. Rose's little 
original foundation on the prairies. The Mass was 
in honor of St. Angela Merici, foundress of the 
Ursulines, quite appropriate for the opening of a 
house of education. There being no other boarding 
school in all the wide distance from here to the 
Rocky Mountains, and only five or six httle local 
Catholic schools, there is left a wide scope for the 
development of this community — of which more 
anon. 

10.10 P. J/.— All is still. Not a leaf stirs. Not a 
ripple, I think, on the lake. No sound but the soli- 



28 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

tary "clack," ''clack" from a disquiet water-bird, 
the fiddle of the cricket, or the hiz-z-z of the mus- 
quitol — 

"Te lucis ante terminum, 

Rerum Creator, poscimus 

Ut pro tua dementia 

Sis Presul et Custodia." * 



British Importations into Canadian North- 
west. 
yiine 2 1. 22 and 23 were occupied by discussions 
on the iniquity of the selfish British Government 
sending paupers, criminals or others to Canada and 
even to our shores. We must lump all in the fol- 
lowing letter to the Boston Pilot, adding somewhat. 

AvocA, Minn., June 34. 

Edito7' of tJie Pilot : — Your, and the prominent 
Catholic American press', late strictures on the im- 
portations of people from the British Isles to the 
Canadian Northwest and even to our own States, 
encourage me to advance some practical commen- 
taries from the very neighborhood. 

The seventy-odd delegates to the C. T. A. B. 
Union of America, who were favored ^vith free 
tickets to Winnipeg and Manitoba last summer, 
could give no good account of the trumpeted Red 
River Valley or its contisfuous territory in British 



*) First >erse of Hymn for Complins: 

"Thee, God, before the end of day, 
Creator of the worlds, we praj, 
Do for thine own sweet mercy sake 
Us under thy protection take." 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 29 

America. They complained especially very bitterly 
of the swamped wheat fields, the alkalined water, 
and corroborated the detailed reports of correspond- 
ents to the Chicago Tribune and other practical 
sightseers. 

Having made it an object of particular inquirv, 
on the testimony of several — two or three I specially 
remember — I have found that there are but patches 
of decently cultivatable land near the Red River, in 
fact at a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, the re- 
mainder being nothing more than 

A Grand Natural Drain 

and swamp of the northern "divide.'*' All the disad- 
vantages of cold, w^et, proximate untamableness, 
militate against this valley more and more strongly 
as you leave the middle line of even Minnesota and 
Dakota, and above the British line; and as you as- 
cend through Manitoba and Saskatchewan into 
Athabaska-Mackenzie and the surroundings of Hud- 
son's Bay, you are climbing the butt end of the 
North Pole. 

In conversation to-day upon the English Govern- 
ment and syndicates' shipping of human cattle to 
Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Canadian Northwest, 
I propounded the question to a prominent dignitary, 
how it was possible for the imported poor to survive 
in those untamed wintry wilds? He agreed fully 
with me that it was hard to see how% taking into 
consideration, first, the aw^ful degree of cold preva- 
lent or, at least, incident there last season — up to 60 
and 67 degrees below zero at periods, and a late cor- 



30 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

respondent stating average winter cold at 40 degrees 
below; secondly, the improvidence of the people 
and want of shiftiness; thirdly, the companies' and 
Government officials' cold business arrangements, 
and lastly, the immense number shipped at once and 
houseless. 

To be sure, the same happens in great part in Da- 
kota and Montana, when two lines of railroad (if 
they do not lie in their reports), the Chicago and 
Northwestern, and the C. M, and St. P. Railroads 
have shipped, this spring, upwards of 200,000 to 
Dakota. There, no Government provision was 
made; the demands far exceeded supplies both of 
lumber for houses or sheds and provisions for man 
and beast. They explain the problem partially by 
stating that the freight cars used for transport were 
left the shiftless families for shelter. But it would 
be impossible. We agreed that there was 

Great Negligence, 

and in fact, rascality on the part of the interested 
Britishers in their anxiety to get rid of troublesome 
"paupers." Our own interested railroad officials and 
land-grabbers on our side of the line, and the omnip- 
otent syndicates on the British side, have studiously 
avoided letting accounts of colonists' surely appall- 
ing sufferings and present destitute condition creep 
into the current press. But facts from individuals 
have leaked out and those living in Minnesota, who 
have their ears open, know at least enough scattered 
details about both the lands of the English Gov- 
ernment and the appendant RedjjRIver Valley to 
warn off people who donH intend to commit suicide. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 3I 

If this whole sche?ne — sche?ne, indeed, of schemers of 
the abominable Irish-hating and poor-despising 
English officials — be not a practical repetition of the 
Cromwellian transportation to the colonies here and 
the Barbadoes, of the enslaved "Hell-or-Connaught"- 
bound prisoners of war, one would inquire the hair- 
splitting difference. If this be miscalled voluntary 
emigration, the fact that Ireland has come to her 
present pass by the fault of her seven-century op- 
pressors gives the lie to the misnomer. Woe be to 
those so miserable, they have naught before them 
but a choice between British poor-houses and emi- 
gration to British America. 

I might conclude by predicting very safely on the 
basis of some already accredited data of single fami- 
lies and small batches of colonists who, having got- 
ten soon disgusted with much further North and 
West, actually fell back on the southern half of 
Minnesota, that there will be an ebb of emigration 
of this wild, Avholesale, compulsory or foolishly 
voluntary emigration, as well as a flow. A great 
proportion of the best class and colonists of some 
means will inevitably have to use their common 
sense in ebbing back to this favored region — and 
the surrounding eligible prairies of Iowa and 
Nebraska, Southern Dakota and Montana. If 
some disadvantages of weather are trying, they are 
much less so in degree and by comparison even with 
our own public lands; while immeasurably, in fact 
incomparably, superior are matters of soil, weather, 
people, cjiurch facilities and schools of these parts as 
put in possible competition with the inhospitable 
regions of British rule. 



32 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 



At the last moment I have come across a map of 
pubHc lands in the Dominion of Canada, printed 
at Montreal and by the authority of the Minister of 
the Interior, which lies as palpably under wilful mis- 
takes about the summer and winter climate as any 
advertisement. 

Just imagine, as here red and black lined, the same 
summer degree (sixty) from Victoria, U. S., around 
Great Slave Lake, past Deer and Winnipeg Lakes 
and down to forty-third parallel, a difference of 
about 20 degrees of latitude. And all the southern 
included region is marked in red letters, Vas^ Region 
of Excellent Farming Lands. Another enclosure, 
of course of more exquisite country, of 65 degrees 
Fahrenheit, from Peace River to off Long Island, 
N. Y. Happy New Yorkers! A winter of average 
15 degrees (not said whether above or below zero) 
is divided off from Mt. Fairweather, Alaska, in 
southeastern course, to Rush City, Minn., and Ot- 
to wa. Can.; or of 20 degrees from top of Lake 
Michigan, past Toronto, to Albany, N. Y. And we 
write thus even with the admitted probability of the 
fact in sight, that the lines of cultivatable lands ex- 
tend many more degrees north, in the region west 
of the great lakes and the Mississippi, than they do 
either side of the Alleo^hanies in the East. . . . 



To all this might be added, what the editor thought 
proper to omit, that Fr. Nugent of Liverpool and 
other ecclesiastics or prominent laymen, engaged 
in forwarding the interests of immigrants' to the 
Canadian Northwest, do not, I believe, take the re- 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 33 

sponsibility of answering for the wisdom or iin- 
charity of the speculators in human flesh and souls; 
but use their influence and do personal work in 
alleviation of the evils concomitant with anv slio-hter 
benefits accruing to the exported. 

Importations into England are fraught with so 
many proved dangers to the mercurial Celts, that a 
very hard alternative is often chosen to avert iictual 
loss of souls — even, we may argue, by running risk 
of loss of lives. 

Besides (and I will freely admit the testimony of 
all good men), who knows? There are those who 
aver that life and a reasonable prosperity are among 
the possibilities in settlements of such high latitudes. 

After all, Horace Greeley and the New York 
philanthropists, together with the majoritv of our 
jDast geographists, had finally to admit that the race 
rising in America is practically fitted for coping 
with what would be chimeras with other peoples. 
This has been demonstrated by the much more bear- 
able and profitable habitability of the western plains 
ascending to the Rockies than was credited or 
credible to the uninitiated. 

Therefore, the Pilot letter may be modified to the 
extent to confess that, if interested "Englishers" and 
their inhuman accomplices on both sides of the 
water have -at best only worldly and self-interested 
motives in running the necks and souls of the un- 
protected poor into jeopardy on the one side; on the 
other, the candid opinions and believable experi- 
ences of our Prelates on both sides of the British 
line here disagree to the point, that what some con- 



34 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 



demn, others as freely endorse and want to see car- 
ried out. 

One probable argument, however, might be a sub- 
ject for debate as for or against the proximate utility 
of lands and regions above described, viz: Why did 
not the stupendously powerful Hudson Bav Com- 
pany, which had the actual dominion, like verv 
monarchs, of all this British America, do something 
more, in their over two hundred years' possession, 
towards attempting the, to them, most profitable 
colonization of these wilds and steppes? 

Maybe, it was not their interest or philanthropy, 
if you will, to let any of their power slip thro' their 
fingers by giving chances of free holdings.'^ Possible. 

But why, again, did they make such a tremendous 
row, in the long national contest concerning the fix- 
ing of our northern boundaries, about getting hold 
of the country included in Washington, Oregon 
Territory and present Montana, in fact, the whole 
line to the great lakes? if all the, now American, 
ground was not so much more valuable that they 
preferred it — and they knew the comparatiye values — 
to a great part of what they had indisputably pos- 
sessed. Doubtful — but preponderating for the 
American side and views. We may safely conclude 
this prolix and vexatious discussion by adducing 
two of the highest authorities — one in spirituals, one 
in temporals — namely. Most Rev. Archbishop Lynch, 
in his second great letter, written at the suggestion 
of Pope Pius IX to the whole Irish Hierarchy; and 
Mr. John Sweetman. Here is the first: "We repeat 
again, that wdiich could not be effected in Ireland 
by religious persecution, loss of lands and homes, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 35 

social disabilities and starvation, has been accom- 
plished here, in too many instances, by the enemy of 
all good and his agents. This forced emigration of 
an impoverished people into a new country whose 
inhabitants are overwhelmingly non -Catholic, has 
effected it." The second is the conclusion of ''Re- 
cent Experiences:*" "From the experience of this 
Company's efforts in Southwestern Minnesota, a 
countr}' already largely settled and thoroughly inter- 
sected with railroads, I would conclude that any 
Government scheme to settle large numbers of des- 
titute Irish families in the Canadian Northwest 
would be sure to fail. They would, no doubt, have 
the advantage of having free land, instead of having 
to pay twenty -five shillings the acre, but the price 
of land is a small portion of the expense of farming 
in the West, and they w®uld have the disadvantage 
of being fav from markets, and having a longer and 
colder winter." 



Avoca, yune 2\st. — I said the second day's Mass 
in the Convent on St. Aloysius' feast — "the angelic 
youth, exemplar of innocence and chastity," given 
by Benedict XIII as "the patron special to studious 
youth." How fitly these two first Masses in honor 
of St. Angela, and the angels' compeer, will be 
rounded off in sweet trinity by the 30th of August's 
feast of our own St. Rose of Lima! — just the eve of 
school opening in September, when our colonists' 
bright children sing their own peculiar hymn to 
St. Rose, to invoke her blessing on school, home 
and heart! 



36 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

ST. ROSE OF HOLY MARY. 

When blush of light had shown 

Thy face, like roses blown. 

The Queen claimed thee Her own. 

St. Mary's Child! 
Sweet in thv garden cell 
Thine angel loved thee well. 
And with thee camejo dwell, 

Rose undefiledl 

Till Jesus' garment hem 
Did touch thy leafy stem, 
Thou droopedstjike to them 

Thorn -crucified; 
Erecting sudden head. 
With ardors blushing red. 
When, "My heart's Rose"! He said. 

"Be thou my bride" ! 

Sweet God! whose dewy grace 
Blessed dear Columbia's race 
With meek St. Rose's face. 

And virgin bloom : 
Make us, 'neath Convent guides. 
Thine own devoted brides. 
Scent all thy prairie wides 

With Christ's perfume! 

yune 22d. — Next day we had a hot but success- 
ful fish in the inlet, capturing some fourteen fat 
pickerel. Great flocks of jack snipes, a large game 
but rather tame bird, the size of a spring chicken, 
came sailing over the upper end of the lake, and wc 
got two distant shots, failing to stop their progress. 
Moonlighting over the Prairie. 

We rode in the face of the full orb of night. How 
beautiful to see the star of first magnitude rising 



SIX \vp:eks in our rockies. 37 

fiery in the West, gradually increasing in splendor, 
advancing like the Star of Bethlehem, until the 
broad Jieadlight bulged into the village with clang- 
ing of bell and scream of engine whistle, while 
the dull gold moon rose simultaneously in the East, 
chased with its defined chasms and moon moun- 
tains, great and broad ; anon lessening and silvering 
as it mounted, until its bright disk controlled all the 
sky! We heard a strange "click"-"click" over the 
drear prairie as we drove along. It precisely resem- 
bled a telegraph taj ping, only in the quality of the 
sound, which was woody. It followed and came 
along near, and involuntarily a sort of superstitious 
creeping stole up our spines — the noise was cer- 
tainly weird — doubled finally and seemed to be pur- 
suing us. I wonder yet what it was, it could scarcely 
be a bird, certainly not a serpent, nor did it sound 
like any known insect. 

We slept soundly after our drive. Night air is 
proved not unwholesome where there is no rank 
vegetation, nor foul standing water. 

Finally, on the 23d, we went to Currie, the present 
representative of a county seat, late for Mass on St. 
John's day. I shot some birds at 8| P. M. and tried 
how late I could see to aim, spotting a plover at just 
9 o'clock, but missing him. I could see the time by 
my small watch on the prairie to fully ten minutes 
or quarter past 9 o'clock. 

June Zd^th.—G\Qx\o\\^ St. John the Baptist! Pray 
for us. ''Solve polhiti labii reatum, Sancte Joannes^' 
indeed be our prayer for the purification of our 
guilty lips that talk so much and such foolishness! 
Savs a Holv Father: ''We hear naught of St. John 



38 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

in Scripture, "save his conception and father's 
oracle, his leaping in the womb and his voice in 
the desert." .... "He had no childhood, but, above 
nature, above his age, placed in his mother's womb, 
he started life with the full measure of the age of 
the fullness of Christ." 



Three Winters in Murray County, Minn. 

While at Currie, we learned some items of the 
past three winters from a practical German trades- 
man, wheelwright and carpenter. The first in 1880, 
was the worst in memory; but even then com- 
menced only late in February. For fifteen days, 
people had no mails. Seventy men had to dig a 
road by shoveling away the great banks of snow, 
from Tracy, fifteen miles north, to get at a hundred 
cords of firewood piled within three miles of Currie. 
This winter you could not stir about much. In 
'8i-'83, the weather continued so mild that the 
$10,000 Currie Church, all frame, was commenced 
after Christmas and put under roof by the following- 
March. Men worked for weeks together without 
fire in their shops. There was notably not enough 
snow for sleighing the whole season thro', tho' the 
roads continued frozen. 

In '82-'83, in spite of the six or seven short severe 
blizzards, there was fine driving, of course in sleighs 
or slides, most of the time. The sfreat snow storms 
lasted but one, or at most, two days, tho' I have it 
from a sufferer, that he had been blocked on a train 
for three days and had to live on pretty hard tack 
till relieved. It is not coldest during the blizzards, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 39 

the thennoineter seldom ranging to i8 or 38 degrees 
below zero. The coldest here recorded last winter 
was 35 degrees below, ten or fifteen degrees lower 
than the worst at this writing, January, 1884, and the 
actual point reached, even in the Ohio valley this 
winter. By contrast, we had at Avoca on Wednes- 
day last 114 degrees in the sun; on Friday 86 degrees 
in the shade. First bouquet of prairie roses! 

It is a singularity that many a time, as is the case 
commonly in the Ohio valley, there is decided win- 
ter weather in the shape of profuse snow falls or 
bitter, biting spells, only after Christmas, or even 
sometimes not before Candlemas, on the 3d of 
February. So here, there are severe frosts and freez- 
ing, but these are not so violent but, winter about, 
public work, building, even plastering with stoves 
to dry gradually by, may not be continued far past 
the fall season proper. In fact, in St. Paul, Minne- 
apolis, and other large cities, housebuilding goes on 
every winter almost without interruption, except for 
severer intervals. 

This may happen out on the prairies too, as I 
have learned from honest mechanics. 

In looking over a record, which a prominent 
farmer and grazer, Mr. Dan. Murphy, of Avoca, 
kept day by day for the past two winters, springs 
and falls, I was astounded to find a large proportion 
of days marked as "fair," "fine," "very fine," and so 
soft as "pleasant" in the heart of the hardest season, 
viz: about January and February of the worst winter. 
Very bad weather is the exception here as elsewhere 
in the habitable agricultural districts, according to 
eye and touch witnesses ; nor does it last so long, 
ordinarily, as strangers imagine or believe. 



_j.O SIX SEASONS OX OUK PRAIRIES. 

It would, however, be folly to deny that it is very 
cold almost all the winters. Long cultivated dis- 
tricts, especially tree-planted, do seem to change 
temperature for the better. 

It is equally true that there is no such thing as 
what is vulgarly termed a "let-up" to the dry per- 
sistent grip of winter proper. There are indubitably 
dreadful snow storms betimes, lasting for several 
days — in effect by exception for a week — in which it 
is dangerous, not only for foot passengers and riders 
or drivers to be out far from help, ])ut even for the 
great iron horse. 

Adrian, Nobles Co., Minn., June 2^th to i^th. — 
Rev. Wm. Keul, pastor of Avoca, and I have just 
returned from an overland trip to Adrian, Nobles 
County, a progressive colony town. We are tired 
out for the nonce. Badger Lake, on the way to 
lona, Murray County, with cross-armed tree, al- 
ways consulted as a guide across the southwestern 
prairie, is quite full of water. Slough would be its 
more proper name, for it is very sedgy yet. Not 
many ducks on it, tho' in full season. The goodly 
number of trees that fringe the western shores 
would, if trimmed and cared for, mark the place 
with a parklet of uncommon beauty. It commands 
a fine prospect over the lake and surrounding roll of 
hills. 

Fr. McDonnell's Home of the Sacred Heart. 

Father McDonnell, the projector of the Home of 
the Sacred Heart for orphans at lona, has a new 
matron over his embryo establishment, assisted by 
several maids to attend the inmates, now consisting 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 4I 

of some live little fellows of tender age. The Rev. 
Superior is also factotum in temporal matters of the 
neighborhood, being, I believe, a civil magistrate, 
and certainly the local postmaster and storekeeper. 
In this latter capacity he is famed the country over 
for selling very low and cheap for cash — perhaps 
sometimes on "tick," the good Father! 

The nine thousand acres turned over to him at the 
division of the Avoca colony land comprise some 
fairly rolling sections, notably about the seven-or- 
eight-house village of lona, around the promontory- 
like front of which flows a small stream. There 
was once practical question about settling some of 
the Avoca township farmers and other new comers 
in and about the supposedly government land near 
here. A few took steps to secure it, and maybe one 
or two actually lived on it a time. The tract was 
however in dispute between the railroad companies; 
and it was perhaps fortunate enough that the specu- 
lating parties did not invest, as it has come to ear 
that the C. St. P. M. and O. Railroad Company, in 
final suit, has had the land adjudged to them as part 
of their bonus. 

Qiiite a picturesque railroad trestle fronts the 
Home, a large square frame, built originally for a 
hotel, with spacious rooms for store, office, refectory 
and kitchen down stairs; and the upper story di- 
vided off into small and larger apartments for sleep- 
ing, storage, etc. 

We had occasion to find out that the innocent 
lookinsf stream circlinsf about the town limits is 
nearly up to a horse's neck, viz : by our vehicle 
being nearly foundered in the deep narrow sink. 
The water is clear and sweet. 



42 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PKAIIJIES. 

On the borders of the great sections of the farm 
Hes a beautiful, quadrangular lake, ''Cora Belle," if 
you please, wherever it tripped up on such an aes- 
thetic name. In* very deed a fine expanse of water, 
level shores, deep, and half a mile square. To the 
right approaching it from the village is a smaller 
lakelet with little round tufted islands, quite taking 
in their light green softness and grace. Both are 
the great haunt of grand flocks of wild geese, of 
course, thousands of duck, and particularly fre- 
quented by a singular large white crane, of good 
edible quality. We knew the sandhill crane, which 
is properly a land-lubber, is prized as a delicacy; not 
so of water cranes. 

Going to and from Adrian, we made a thirty-mile- 
sided parabola; thus seeing upwards of fifty, near 
sixty miles of the borders of Murray County and a 
gross half of Nobles County. The land seems ordi- 
nary prairie, rather inclined to sudden elevations and 
depressions, flat levels of miles of watery bottoms 
stretching frequently between the lines of knobby 
rolls, which latter are mostly thin soiled and 
gravelly. Deep sloughs and water cuts diversif}- 
the landscape and spoil many sections. .. 

Adrian (Minnesota) Colony. 

Mr. Wm. J. Onahan, Secretary of "The Irish 
Catholic Colonization Association," in his third 
annual report. May, 1882, furnishes the preliminary 
information of this Catholic settlement: ''Rev. C.J. 
Knauft', pastor of the Adrian (Minn ) Colony, gave 
an account of his charge. The colony was estab- 
lished in 1877 by Bishop Ireland, of St. Paul, who 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 43 

obtained the right from the St. Paul & Sioux City 
Raih'oad Company to sell 70,000 acres of land in 
Nobles County, on the Worthington and Sioux Falls 
branch. In that year there were but two houses in 
Adrian, and now there are four hundred. Father 
Knauft' was the first Catholic and the first priest to 
settle in the place, and now there are two hundred 
and fifty Catholic families there. It is situated on a 
high plateau forming the divide between the Missis- 
sippi and Missouri rivers, and the soil is very rich. 
The products are wheat, corn, flax, barley and oats. 
The heavy rains of last season reduced the crops, 
but the prospects for a big yield this year are very 
good. Two-thirds of the population are Irish, and 
one-third of German nationality." 

x\ccustomed to levels on the prairie, you look 
down astonished at the cattle and sheep grazing in 
the low bottoms near Adrian. We met on the jour- 
ney the largest herd of cattle I have ever seen on 
the open prairie, as many as two hundred head of 
beeves and some three hundred sheep, herded by a 
cowbov on horseback and a shepherd dog. A large 
field of waving rye sways ready for the sickle, and 
rising as high as four and one-half to five feet. Bar- 
ley is nearly as far advanced. Wheat seems some 
fourteen to eighteen inches. Vegetables are getting 
plentiful in well-weeded gardens. 

Adrian has so manv as six hundred inhabitants, 
rises tierwise on a gentle slope — good school build- 
ing w^orth $2,000. and Catholic establishment and 
comfortable priest's residence, surrounded by nur- 
series of trees, a modicum giving tolerable shade. 

The pastor, Rev. C. J. KnaufT, claims (as previ- 



44 "^'X SEASONS ON OUlt I'KAIRIES 

ously reported) two hundred and fifty families here 
and in surrounding missions, five in number. This 
learned gentleman is also a member of the great 
Colonization Board of Chicago, in charge of numer- 
ous prairie colonies. We were much jaded by the 
tedious ride with a backless buggy over the uneven, 
almost roadless district. We kept the prairie most 
of the way, passed some sloughs up to the hub in 
black loam; and finally thro' sheer fatigue and back 
ache I sat in the front booth of the buggy, leaning 
my back against the dash board with my legs 
thrown over the seat. Returning, we had a ""lazy" 
back arranged after long manufacture; gave our 
poor horse a new rig and net, and enjoyed cooler 
weather. One finds it can become uncomfortably 
warm riding hours out, even while it remains cool 
and pleasant indoors. We killed and messed on 
eleven curlews and as many plovers on the w^ay. 
The number of shots fired (we counted for curiosity) 
was about thirty- five; so some two-thirds hit, on the 
wing. 

Avoca, yune 2^th. — Back to our Avoca; I have 
scarcely begun the day; woke at 5; arose at 5f ; Holy 
Mass at 6|; served another at 7. Fr. Koeberl, the 
first colony pastor, is visiting us — a fine, tall, well- 
formed Austrian, with the characteristic blonde hair, 
fresh as new silk, and bluish eyes. He had a rough 
mission here — a pair of small box rooms to lodge in 
and board at the hotel, such as it was. 

How the glorious sunny days follow one another, 
each finer than the succeeding; some so magnifi- 
cent with glittering, sparkling shine, coolish, vivify- 
ing breeze, haloing influence on the shrubbery on 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 45 

the lake banks; the simple stalks of green waving 
here and there, rendered vocal by the multifarious 
calls and catches of birds of sea and land, that one 
is tempted to shout aloud for very joy and exulta- 
tion: ''This is the day that the Lord hath made; let 
us exult and rejoice therein. My soul doth mag- 
nify the Lord. And all that is within me bless 
His Holy Name." Thus one lives at times intensely. 
I can scarce contain myself, and after such exterior 
joy I am set musing, oh I so sweetly! 

2(^th. — ^Sts. Peter and Paul! How cold we are in 
presence of such ardor of words and deeds! What 
right ambition have I that with St. Chrysostom, I 
do not weep over the w^ords of the ardent apostles, 
impetuous, human Peter, diviner Paul — but both 
after their conversion. Give me but a throb of their 
devotion to the cause of Jesus the Christ, living in 
them, working by them. Have mercy, clement 
Lord, on all thy consecrated servants this day and 
forever! 

Austrian Colonists. 

We came home late last evening from the really 
beautiful family of Austrians, the Steincrs, living to- 
wards the Des Moines country, five miles east. We 
had some fracas tho' on the way with an indignant 
Norwegian who wanted to collar us for riding thro' 
his grain field. Fact is, we had got mixed up in 
finding a proper road and seeing worn tracks thro' 
the wheat drove ahead regardless of naught but our 
direction. But the fellow was a sorehead and 
wanted to pick a quarrel. Expostulating with him 
mildly we could not allay his anger and he threat- 



46 SIX SEASONS OX OUR PRAIRIES. 

ened us with prosecution for trespass. We let him 
lather away and bade him — go to the judge. He 
was very curious to see what one of us had just shot 
on his premises, as the chicken season was not open 
and he was itching for a chance to indict us for 
law -breakage. But we had the inside track ; they 
were only plovers. 

But our Austrians! How singular, or rather how 
natural, to find such genuine worth and attractive 
moral beauty in one of these low box houses of a 
single room and kitchen — with naught to recom- 
mend the inmates but their Christian manners and 
trifles of attention. 

Here is apparently a rough man of the prairie, 
who, with his unshaven face, bristly mustache and 
red complexion, has withal the actual politeness of 
reverence and true humility, mingled with, and 
grounded on. an unobtrusive charity. There is no 
genuine politeness and all is hollow, without these 
three virtues. Waiting on the table and changing 
the common stone china plates, his kindly eye of 
bluish grev, and intelligent person become an object 
of complaisence, tho' he says only: "Bitte (please 
take this or that") as he relieves you of something 
and hands another, adding as he heaps your plate: 
''Essen Sie, nur, Herr Pfarrer, was Ihncn gefcellt, 
und lassen Sie dass andere!" (Eat only what you 
like, sir, and leave the rest.") 

And his practical wife, a true woman, who is a 
good cook of her specialty of Austrian dishes, and 
careful housekeeper, priding simply in her art with- 
out least oftense, aye, only for your gratification. 
She is, w^e find, an educated woman, cultivated, un- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 



47 



derstanding person, who knows her business in 
hand and is only artlessly curious to know of thinors 
pertinent to utility. 

Her care of her three hearty children, beautiful in 
their prairie rosiness and plump health, is only of a 
moral piece with her deferential conduct towards 
her husband, and her heartfelt passionateness in 
kissing- on her knees the hands of each of the 
priests, asking their blessing for a purpose. With 
homeliness tho' some regularity of features, in her 
simple dark calico, and without an ornament, fresh 
from over the stove, cooking our meal, she is attrac- 
tive. Her smile is sweet when she shows her regu- 
lar teeth and her e} e kindles with pleasure and pride 
over the honor done her by her loved ''Herren 
Pfarrer." In the beauty of her prairie home, and its 
to her all-in-all inmates, the woman's untainted 
womanliness makes her lovely and lovable. 

Dear Christian hearts, willing hands, health v 
bodies and sound minds! Here they dwell on the 
rolling banks of the meandering Des Moines river; 
in view of their flourishing crops and small herd of 
lowing cattle, which they are but keeping however, 
their souls clinging to God and truth first ; succeed- 
ing moderately in this world's goods, they are an 
example and a sample of the all but inimitable good 
German Catholic colonists. 



I was repaid for my necessitated promenade be- 
tween twelve and one last night. The sweet dav 
had lingered so long, long over the favored summer 
plains. Little strings of coral, amber, amethyst and 



48 SIX SEASONS OX OUR PRAIRIES. 

pearl dotted and fringed the horizon. The roUing 
smoke grew pink in the setting rays. The sun dis- 
appeared and the shades crept majestically over a 
section of the east, then over a larger and ever larger 
half-circle. But on to even 10 o'clock, the last faint 
rays played on the western limits of the billowy 
fields. I went to bed, but could not rest 12, mid- 
night. How only mildly, warmly bright, the glories 
of the heavens, the branching milky way, feathery 
silver ; Lyra, in middest heaven, enthroned ; Sirius 
sharply brilliant; the Dipper broadly luminous. 
How near seemed the soft pulse of the starry host 
on the bosom of ether! Could not an attentive ear 
hear the symphony of these God- worthy spheres? 
An awe of divine presence crept over me, and a 
thrill shook the sanctuary of my soul. 

How prayerful the night. Alone with God and 
his silent, majestic creation. I heard the solitary 
scale of the bittern in the slough. A prairie lark 
gave vent to a single, trumpet-like call. A dog 
bayed the rising moon with a single bark. I stood 
alone awake of all the inhabitants of these limitless 
regions. And these were but imitative cries of the 
soul towards its Creator! I bowed struck with over- 
powering emotion, bent the knee and recited the 
8th Ps.: "Domine, Dominus, Noster.'' Holy Trin- 
ity, save me ! '-Thy magnificence is elevated above 
the heavens. I will behold thy heavens, the works 
of (but) thy fingers: the moon and stars which thou 
hast set." And I am of those "whom thou hast 
made little less than the angels, crowned with glory 
and honor and set over all the works of thy hands!" 
Tho' this last applies only to the perfect man — 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 49 

Christ Jesus — until we shall have grown to his stat- 
ure, "been placed over manv things'' w hen ''found 
faithful over few." 

White Heat and Cruel Hunt. 

'ipth yiine — 15/ jfuly. — Some grass is read}- to cut 
in the first dry sloughs. A few arc cutting in 
patches. The degree of heat, growing greater each 
day for half the week, is wonderful for the prairie. 
Were it not for the almost continuous breeze it 
would be insufferable without shade. 97 degrees in 
the middle half of the day. From 9^ to 98 degrees 
throughout Southwestern Minnesota, reaching, I 
hear, a hundred, in some localities, the hottest for 
the day of any part of the 'United States. I suffered 
from it hunting yesterday evening; could make out 
but a meagre tea. We killed some nineteen birds 
in this and the morning's passing hunt. 

The chicken-like plover, how confidently they 
strut in my neighborhood this sunny, Sunday morn, 
regardless, ignorant of my bloodthirsty persecution 
of the feathered kind. I could all but side with 
Thomson in his Seasons where he writes : 

"This falsely-cheerful barbarous game of death, 
This rage of pleasure, which the restless youth 
Awakes, impatient with the gleaming morn: . . . 
Man . . . with the thoughtless innocence of power 
Inflamed, bejond the most infuriate wrath 
Of the worst monster that e'er roamed the waste. 
For sport alone pursues the cruel chase. 
Amid the beaming of the gentle days. 
Upbraid, yo. ravening tribes, our wanton rage, 
For hunger kindles you, and lawless want; 
But lavish fed, in Nature's bounty rolled, 
To joy at anguish and delight in blood 
Is what voin- horrid bosoms never knew." 



50 SIX SEASONS OX OirK PRAIKIHS. 

Very appropriate if proper exceptions l)e allowed. 
It seems indeed a cruel alternative. The saints of 
old and of our own times have been noted for their 
kind treatment of, and ftimiliarity with, beasts and 
birds and fish. It is like the two things to choose 
between in answering blow bv blow even in self- 
defense, or in allowing the smiter to strike the other 
cheek. The latter is more perfect, but the former 
allowed. I would not deprive tiiese innocents of 
life for mere sport's sake, and will not wantonly de- 
stroy them, fearful of the threat of the Holy Writ : 
"The life of the beast shall be required at thv 
hands.'' Shall not even they stand in judgment 
against us, tho' St. Thomas teaches none shall be 
resuscitated! 

I found a sort of ''cockscoml)" growing on tall 
underbrush by the higher lake banks. And more 
worthy of note, what but a genuine wild "vSweet 
William" with its pleasant, red, tive-petaled blos- 
somlets and bursted, sheath-like, striped oalheads! 
The dwarf wild roses dot the prairie and lake 
shores in all stages from tiny buds to full-blown 
pink and white five-leaves. The very grasses are 
wondrous, finer far than Hungarian or ordinary 
material for aluming for winter bouquets. Some 
tossing feathery plumes of exquisite gloss and fine- 
ness grow in patches — filmy textures like tangled 
spiderwebs hide the dark soil of slough beds; dozens 
of varieties of heads and stems, partitions and branch- 
ings make the prairie bloom without blossom. 



Two more Nuns of the Holy Child arrived bv 
last night's train, bringing also a voun^r Cuban to 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. Z,l 

summer with them for her health and to avoid the 
plague that is prevalent in her island-h(jme of the 
West Indies. The number of nuns is now seven; 
but Mother Waldburga, the Mother Vi caress of the 
whole Society, after settling the propertv of the 
Community, will leave its organization and the 
school to gentle Mother St. Antony. There is re- 
markable refinement combined with veriest industrv 
in these ladies of this Anglo-American Congrega- 
tion. Their notable Anglicisms are prettv, and thev 
seem withal to have the push of Americans. 

Comic Characters. 

We have them on the prairie as elsewhere and 
maybe, as Addison argues, our laughter at them 
proceeds from our pride that we are smarter than 
they. Here is an original but not imaginary hero of 
the cap and bells. He was imported from — you mav 
guess where. Very broad-faced, deep-whiskered, 
narrow between the eyes, with tongue hung like a 
clapper, our extravagant braggart, poor fellow, is, if 
not happy in his ignorance, very deep set in his 
opinions — if always a responsible agent. Book- 
learned in part and with a smattering of experience 
in odds and ends, specially however a sort of expert 
in hunting and a fair "shot," he sets his mouth going 
as by machinery on his pet subjects, and gets out 
the absurdest oddities in neatly trimmed phrase. 

*'Ho! do ye know^? my dog, pure Irish setter, is 
perfect. Never knew him to fail to set a bird in 
due rang^e. You must sfuard agfainst saving- the 
least word to him on the field.'' Well, that dog has 
the queerest look and manner one ever saw in a ca- 
nine. He is sharp, brisk, but his eye wanders and 



^2 SIX SEASONS OX OUR PRAIRIES. 

his head seems fuddled, if his brain is not addled. 
For, bv m\ fowling piece! if I didn't take him out 
one day and he managed with great halloing to ''put 
up" two chickens tolerably. The next thing, left to 
himself, he ran over six birds, all hand-running but 
one, and this one he ran into in plain sight of all but 
himself, after havnisr set him for nearly a full minute 
just preceding. 

"Oh! I thought he was perfect. He never does 
the like with me." I doubted this considerably. 
But what was added proved the dog smart: ''Do ye 
know" — with a slv wink — "that dog knows a gentle- 
man at sight, and won't pay the least attention to a 
soldier or a policeman!'' 

But halt, lest we commit the fault we condemn. 
Still it's all in good humor and only observations on 
particular studies in human nature. What If we in- 
terlard such with real nature notes, mindful ever of 
St. Augustin's dinner-table motto: "Whoso back- 
bites his neighbor is not welcome at this board." 
"Qiiisquis proximum carpit absit a' mensa" — or such 
words. 



About this time was published the following let- 
ter, with these head and sub- captions, by the veteran 
editor of the New York Freeman's Journal: 

MINNESOTA: 

ITS CLIMATE ; BUT ESPECIALLY, A GRAND EDUCA- 
TIONAL ESTABLISHMENT. 

Editoi' N. T. Fi-eeman s yournal : Dear Sir — 
Whilst some of your contemporaries are flooding 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 53 

their coliinius with '^CathoHc colony prospects in 
Florida," some jottings from the opposite point of 
the horizon will not seem intrusive. The agricul- 
tural and educational items (published in the Philadel- 
phia ''Catholic Standard'') which I sent from i\voca 
last fall were meagre, and I shall not be longer now — 
not much. Last winter here, from all accounts, was 
most blizzardly affected — the very extreme pole of 
the winter preceding. There is no denying that an 
earnest business blizzard is a fearful demon — not so 
fearful, however, as vour demoniacal tornadoes south 
and east from here. But what's a blizzard to me 
any more than a State penitentiary? I do not expect 
to get into either one, if I know myself, and it's 
pleasant looking at a grand, blowing snowstorm 
from a cosy room. Have a right and tight house, 
not too fashionable, but very sensible; watch the 
sicrns of the clerk of the weather out of the corners 
of both eyes, and drive like fury, if out, in a certain 
direction of a house, and you need fear nothing 
much more serious than chilblained toes and numb 
hsts. Only look out for your nose, if peculiarly 
Roman! Only one man in this region froze to death, 
and he was brimful of whisky. And if there be 
anv one thing a person ought to avoid when travel- 
ing in fierce winter weather — here as elsewhere — 
that thing is throwing a spirit flask to your head 
every few miles — especially when you feel be- 
numbed. Walk and drink water is nature's pre- 
scription — or take a few swallows of good butter or 
some good sweet oil. 

The spring, indeed, seems backward; not excep- 
tionallv so, however, as travelers up through Indi- 



54 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 



ana or Illinois, with their prairies floating in water 
and many wheat fields ploughed up for corn, evi- 
dence. When those conjuncting planets stop fool- 
ing with our atmosphere, North and South, we may 
expect more normal seasons. As to the prevalence 
of spring rains out this far, I l:>elieve, from close oh- 
servation, that, unpleasant as they are, they are 
necessary for this sand-mixed and high-rolling soil 
thoroughly to modify it for the short, hot summer, 
coming on like a thief in the night. 

In any case, crops, except corn, are not looking 
so bad, though low yet; on the contrary, you w^ill 
hear good farmers, who have put their time in and 
have a fairly rolling section, report other grains as 
prospering. We have some lettuce, greens, onions 
and even a few strawberries in gardens. 

Reminiscences of Kentucky. 

Passing along the undulating farms, partly wooded, 
partly prairie, from Winona, on the Mississippi, to 
Heron Lake, almost on a direct west line, I found 
things looking charming indeed — the vegetation 
only about six weeks behind the blooming fields and 
wooded heights of my native Kentucky, thro' which 
I had just finished a five weeks' trip from Cincin- 
nati to Paducah by w^ater, and inland from the 
mouth of the Tennessee to the glorious regions of 
the Blue Grass. I could not fail to notice the pre- 
cise resemblance of the best Minnesota prairie with 
our finest farm and grazing lands along the "Beauti- 
ful River" — but especially about our Lexington and 
the valley of the Kentucky river, minus, of course, 
the park -like, magnificent forest trees, the dusty 



SIX WEEKS IN OUll ROCKIES. 55 

pikes, white fences in the green meadows, and the 
lordly country villas. It is worthy of incidental re- 
mark that the seventeen counties of middle Ken- 
tucky, bordering on the one side the Blue Grass 
region and the Big Bone district, and in between 
the great coal belt about Green River and the Cum- 
berland, were, in the first settlement of the State, 
found to be pure prairie, devoid of all but coarse 
grass, and roamed over by buffaloes, frequented by 
deers and the haunt of large game birds. 

Outside of this, there are sections interspersed be- 
tween neigrhboring- hills on which old inhabitants 
say you could not find a riding-switch forty years 
ago. As all this is now grown up in dense forests, 
and finely timbered, may not a like event happen — 
mutatis mutandis — in the breaks of the Northwest.'' 
Thus the tim])er question may solve itself after the 
fir^t plantings of trees shall have grown a decade old 
and form nature's seminary for propagation. The 
timbered portion of Minnesota, containing nearly all 
the best forest trees, is itself not too far away to 
supplv the winged seeds to the breezes from the East 
and South carrying them West and North. The com- 
parative stoppage of the formerly most destructive 
prairie fir^s will then also allow the tree-seeds to pul- 
ulate in the open soil; antl the frequent rains largely 
supplement the eftorts of man and nature to reclothe 
the wide areas with the fruits of arboriculture. 
Further, it's remarkable that the largest oaks, maples, 
hickories and ash trees of the older Kentucky forests 
will not, ordinarily be found to be more than from 
fifty to one hundred years of age; so that old farmers 
tell us they believe a much larger area was, say a 
hundred years back, pure prairie. 



56 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Eight or ten new arrivals this spring, and in Fulda 
about a dozen new houses l)uilt. This much about 
materiahties. 

Schools for Cathoeic Chiedren 

are a notable dehciency in these regions outside of 
the largest cities and greater towns. In the small 
towns, out in the forming sections, and even in the 
colonies there are not and have not been hitherto 
any provisions for Catholic education. The ubiqui- 
tous public system of colorless instruction has grap- 
pled the soil and followed the onward march of the 
invading railroads. One coming from the southern 
Dioceses, either west or east, or even the German- 
settled archiepiscopal territory adjoining Canada, 
feels the absence keenly, and his first regret is that 
Catholics had not prepossessed the educational facil- 
ities, and led instead of dragging behind in the first 
school enterprises. 

When the majority of town and country districts 
are schooUess for Catholics, even if the greater num- 
ber are of the faith, it will hardly do to solve the 
education problem by grafting a sickly catechetical 
instruction on the tail-end of the school-day. Doses 
of Christian doctrine have been tried on both Sun- 
days and week-days, and been found w^ofully 
wanting in supplying backbone to our air-poisoned 
children. Certainly reasons there are for the slower 
multiplication of our schools this far out — one 
chiefly lying in the incredibly rapid increase of pop- 
ulation of both State and Church, and in the new- 
ness of Church establishments, especially in the 
colonies. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUK ROCKIES. 



:>/ 



When we state that the population of Minnesota 
has increased over a thousand per cent, in ten or 
twelve vears, and the Church has spread her tent 
and widened her borders in proportion — the priests 
amounting in St. Paul Diocese to 140, churches 189, 
schools 79, with 9,418 scholars — one may understand 
the growth of twenty-five years' Catholic hfe. 

A Great Boon. 

And now, to come to some particulars al)out one 
of the oldest of the existing colonies. The wedge 
has been entered on this, the fifth anniversary of 
the foundation of Avoca, by the introduction of the 
Order of the Nuns of the Holy Child Jesus, of whom 
a colony of six or seven have lately arrived under 
Mothers Walburga and St. Antony, to start a board- 
ing and day school. The building used hitherto as 
a hotel, and a really handsome and roomy two-and- 
one-half story frame, is being proximately arranged 
for the reception of scholars. With such re-arrange- 
ment and the portioning off of a large plat of ground 
near the^ Lake of St. Rose of Lima, the Lincoln 
Hotel will scarcely know itself in the beautiful Con- 
vent of Avoca. Foresight and foreknowledge have 
been brought to bear on the scheme by the matter 
having been thoroughly examined and agreement 
made with Right Rev. Dr. Ireland by the Rev. 
Mothers last fall ; so that, relying on Providence 
and being backed up by this already pretty large 
community of Catholics, slowly but surely increas- 
ing, and the whole territory of Southwestern Minne- 
sota to draw upon for boarders, there is certainly 
reasonable prospect of success, when at least the 



58 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

colonies shall have been educated up to a proper 
patronage of the God-sent institution. Some fifty 
children have attended the district school at x^voca. 
If no brilliant success be its portion in the first 
few }'ears, provided only a decent maintenance be 
secured, it will not be unlike the remainder of God's 
foundations on this earth, grounded on faith and 
patience, and seconded by an industry, practicalness, 
and thoroughgoingness characteristic of these expe- 
rienced religious. 

A Pkaciical Priest's Suggestion. 

Whatever drawbacks there are otherwise — and 
some there do exist, humanly speaking — may, we 
think and hope, be counteracted by a /ift from the 
East. How? you will ask. Well, to say simply the 
truth, admitted by candid people who have tested it, 
this being the highest elevated plateau in the plain 
running parallel with the Mississippi River and 
stretching on to the Arctic Ocean — securely proven 
by its being the water-divide between the gulf and 
tile ocean — it is one of ^/ic healthiest places on this 
continent. One of thcin — I don't say the only one. 
Sensible men, outside of land speculators, colonizers, 
or even physicians, from all but every clime, have 
had delighted experience of it, and your Southern 
resorts are slowly — and not so slowly either — being 
abandoned for the purer, drier, less malarial, better 
oxygenized and curative plains of the Northwest. T 
have nothing, the least, to do with colonization, land 
sales, railroads, or speculation, and I can freely say 
on the word of a man and a priest that, judging from 
my own experience for this, now the second sum- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 59 

mer, and that of persons scattered all over South- 
ern Minnesota, I have nowhere found the relief from 
chronic dyspepsia, nor others from incipient con- 
sumption, to be had here for the asking, and the 
running- a little over these dustless and smokeless 
prairies. And on this subject I would refer the in- 
credulous reader to the most timely articles of Dr. 
Felix L. Oswald on the "Remedies of Nature — Con- 
sumption," in the May and June numbers of the 
Popular Science Monthly — et alibi. "God's medi- 
cine'" — the certainly best of all — is here in abundance: 
the three requisites of moderate diet (until you climb 
to a Minnesota appetite!), plenty of pure water and 
the royalest exercise. 

The innumerable lakes teem with varieties of some 
of the sweetest fish that ever swam; the prairies are 
alive with game nearly the year round — certainly for 
three seasons — and fish can be speared by the hun- 
dred pounds in winter; and what roads we Jo have, 
barring a few sloughs now and then in early summer 
or spring! 

So, my plea is for encouragement, practical and 
pressing advice to be given to our thousands of deli- 
cate girls and women, to invade the West in quest of 
health, as men do for gold. Health is the better of 
the two, and more needed. Here is a spot for per- 
sons able to travel (and it's no trick to get out here 
from Chicago in twenty-four hours), and wanting to 
join practical education with a supply of physical 
and mental health that will be stock enough for half 
a score of years. On particular inquiry, I can say 
with confidence, that there is nothing in the regula- 
tions of the Holy Child Nuns which would prevent 
them from risceivinof members of other sisterhoods. 



6o SIX SEASONS OX OUR PIlAUllES. • 

who might be sent for then- health to these parts, 
if their stay be but Hiiiited to a season at a time. 
Many hves of our deUcate Southern rehgious might 
be saved or prolonged by a summer here. 

In the naiiie of common sense, nay, in the holier 
name of the God of Nature! send your drooping 
daughters here to the Convent of Avoca, and as sure 
as pure air, glow of exercise, attractions of unpol- 
luted Nature, can dispense w^ith doctors and their 
doings, their cheeks will acquire the noted Minne- 
sota rose that blooms only this side the Mississippi; 
their delicate bodies will brace up, and they will 
bound like the roe. There will simply be no con- 
trolling their vigorous appetites, when they shall 
have been properly acclimated, and — well, that's 
what they will come for, besides their education, 
which will not fail under the hands of these religious 
ladies, who evidently do not believe in fringes and 
folderollerv, but educate for life." 



Nuns of the Holy Child Jesi^s. 
A circular of the Nuns of the Holy Child Jesus' 
vSchool accompanied this letter, in which intimation 
was made that a midwinter vacation, instead of the 
one in midsummer, would be introduced as a new 
feature suitable to changed circumstances. 

Domestic Teaching. 

And it was dared to be announced that these relig- 
ious ladies would teach on the practical basis of in- 
cluding woman's general work among their scholars, 
and insist with the Rt. Rev. Bishop's express agree- 
ment, the girl pupils should be practiced in sewing. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR IIOCKIES. 6l 

cooking, ironing, etc. It is a new departure in this 
country and a needed innovation Or rather return to 
common sense principles in education. I will not 
weary bv introducing Sr. Mary Frances Clare, the 
famous Nun of Kenmare's, practice in her poor 
schools in Ireland, as told by the Philadelphia Press 
correspondent: 

"You see, sir," she said, ''w'hilst there is a great deal 
of talk about doing good for the Irish peasant, there 
is very little real work being done. Now the 
women are exceedingly ignorant. Certainly it is 
not their own fault, poor things, but that is all the 
more reason for teaching them. There are ver}' 
few girls or women in this very surrounding country 
who can make their husband or brother a good 
shirt. 

No Fresh Eggs in Ireland. 

"An egg is fresh sometimes, yet one seldom gets a 
fresh egg in Ireland. People attribute this to the 
climate. That is not the cause. The women don't 
know how to preserve them at all; so, too, w^ith 
butter. Well then, mv idea is to teach all practical 
house-keeping knowledge, to train house-servants, 
to educate girls in the art of cooking, and to prepare 
them for good, useful, intelligent wives and servants, 
so that when they go out to America you good peo- 
ple will find them serviceable. 

"In this way we hope to return, in a very small 
way, the charity your people are giving toward the 
school. Whatever I find a girl most fit for I intend 
to train her for. The school will not be a patent 
groove machine. \ The education, the book-learning, 
will be confined to practical English branches only. 

"To sustain this school the o-irls must work. I 



62 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

therefore propose to buy knitting machines and 
make knit goods- for the market. These goods are 
not to be sold as charity goods. I shall compete in 
open market, and no other way. If the work won't 
pay that way it will be a failure. Sisters or nuns 
will be taught by professionals, and they will instruct 
the girls. So many hours a day will be devoted to 
such work as will bring in a remuneration for the 
support of the school. Of course, there will be regu- 
lar hours for books, but they will not be many. 

'•I am seeking to do a practical good, and not 
to found a great school of learning. Besides the pu- 
pils we shall have as boarders, we will utilize all the 
women about the neighborhood who can spend their 
now idle time in learning practically needed home 
accomplishments." 

Here are some religious from Switzerland, who 
are braver yet : ''The Theodosian Sisters of the 
Convent of Holy Cross, Canton of Zug, Switzer- 
land, have hit upon a programme of female education 
which ought not to pass unnoticed. Instead of 
training their pupils into lady barristers and lady 
doctors, they aim at turning out practical mothers 
of families and thrifty house wives. Thus, cooking 
in all its departments; the art of carving and serv- 
ing up; the uses of the various market supplies; the 
elements of household chemistry; the scientific ar- 
rangement of kitchen, stores, cellars, and pantries; 
the profitable laying out of vegetable gardens; the 
metliods useful in the laundry; the cure of infant 
diseases; the rearing of babies — are the chapters 
which they courageously write at the head of their 
programme of studies. And this is no mere boast, 
for their teaching- was tested by ladv visitors, and 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 63 

pronounced most satisfactory. The confidence of 
parents rewards the efforts of the trood Sisters; they 
closed the year 1881 with ninety-five boarders, and 
.the year 18S2 with one hundred and thirteen." 



yuly 2d. — And our Lady's beautiful visitation. 
Our Conyent children join with the little ones of the 
whole colony in singing a home-made hymn to 
their patroness, St. Rose of Lima, as fanciedly con- 
nected with our Blessed Mother's visit to her prairie 

children : 

AMERICAS ROSE. 

This visitation day 

We cull each flowering spray 

On prairie, lake and way 

Of sweet St. Rose: 
Pink buds and white to bloom, 
Fit types of virgin womb. — 
St. Rose's breath perfume 

The fliower she chose I 

Who hath but virgin been 
Exults a Mother Queen; 
John Lily's Bud hath seen 

On Jesse's rod; 
Elizabeth does know 
Wliat prophets dimly show, 
And greets her, bending low, 

Who bears her God. 

To seraph's lyric strain 
St. Rose hies o'er her plain 
To join Queen Mary's train 

Ere she departs: 
Her feet a carpet tread 
Of green with blossom spread, — 
St. Rose shall crown her head 

With children's hearts. 



64 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

How much more applicable to the religious teacher 
than to even good Mrs. Hemans, the poetess, are 
these lines addressed to the latter by Mrs. Sigourney: 

"Every unborn age 
Shall seek thee with its household charities; 
The hoary sire shall bend his deafened ear 
And greet thv sweet words with his benizon; 
The mother shrines thee as a vestal flame 
At the lone temple of her sanctity, 
And the young child who takes thee by the hand 
Shall travel with a surer step to heaven." 

Avoca, July 2. — The heat was so sensible all day 
yesterday that the priest giving benediction of the 
most Blessed Sacrament thought proper to warn 
the congregation to pray God to avert any calamity 
that might be impending, as he feared some dreadful 
storm was brewing. At the vespers the singers 
fairlv gave out from exhaustion, and the services had 
to be shortened. 

The thermometer stood at 96 degrees in the shade 
from 10 A. M. (110 degrees in the sun, increased at 
its height to i30 degrees), and culminated at 97 de- 
grees in the Nun's piazza at 4^ or 4^ P. M. It sub- 
sided to 85 degrees by 9 P. M. I was much fearful 
of a storm, if not of a regular cyclone. The sun 
shed a vellowish shine in the afternoon; the horizon 
at all points but towards the West seemed closing in 
upon us, and the wind was warmish until near six 
o'clock, when, in the broadest shade outside and in 
the middle of the house with all apertures open, it 
became somewhat tolerable. The clouds in the 
Northwest were wind-rifted and draggling To- 
wards eig-ht P. M. the heavv bank that had settled 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 65 

due North commenced to show signs of disturbance. 
In an hour or more sheet Hghtning played more or 
less vividly behind it, and by midnight a short toler- 
ably gusty wind swept about us, rousing light 
sleepers and rattling doors and casements annoy- 
ingly. 

Curious too, for the past two nights, I have noted 
a large section of an arc of dimly radiating twilight, 
directly on the horizon under the North Pole Star. 
It looked like the reflection, tho' moving, from a 
quarter-moon or rather distinct Aurora. Was it pos- 
sibly the summer solstice apparition of the borealis? 
It surely must have been; for these premonitions 
evidence an electrical storm, whose seat natural phil- 
osophists have come to conclude resides at the North 
Pole. Or, if not, what could probably throw the 
long evening twilight, reflected often in the North- 
east, so far due North, at half-past ten or a quarter 
to eleven o'clock at night? At eight, some twenty 
or thirty minutes after sunset yesterday, we enjoyed 
that as rare phenomenon of the after-rays of twi- 
light stretching .clear across the zenith and down to 
within 2^ or 30 degrees of the opposite horizon. It 
formed broad, then tapering and expanding, belts of 
whitish light in concentric or eliptic lines from 
Northwest to Southeast, a clearly defined amphi- 
theatric series of alternate white and blue bows. It 
was not so discernible in the Southwest. 

This morning, July 2d, at ten minutes after three 
A. M. I saw the time on my watch dial by daylight. 
Tho' one could stand a blanket on him at mid- 
night, at 9.30 A. M., as I was returning from Church 
carrying a chalice and paten, the reflection of the 



(i6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

sun on the paten burnt my chin; and people are 
sitting around in the open air getting what coolness 
their ingenuity can eke out of the pretty constant 
breeze from the South, by a few points East. We'll 
have a crack and blow yet, and I doubt very con- 
siderably if somebody or bodies have not had one or 
the other or both lately, no great distance from here. 
July 3d. — We have not had it yet, tho' the wind 
has now veered around to the Northwest and the 
sun again sank in clouds after a quite sultry. middle 
day. I learned to-day that the degree in St. Paul, 
Sunday, was even 100 — higher, as above stated, than 
at any other point at the given time anywhere in 
the United States, not excepting New Orleans. 

Heavy Hunt and Whimsical Fish. 

Our sportsman and man-of-all work, to-day, con- 
tends that he not only killed forty birds with forty - 
one shots, but in some six weeks killed for a firm in 
Tracy, twenty-four miles north, five hundred and 
twenty chickens, twenty odd per day for six days in 
the week! But if he did, and it is possible, he 
knows more about hunting than fishing for pickerel, 
mud cats and bass. He showed me a case of 
hooks, artificial flies and baits, from the finest trout 
hook to the great clumsy harpoon with peacock 
feathers at its heel; and was explaining to me how 
splendid they would be to troll with in the lake. I 
am not sure but he tried his luck with some of his 
flies, where no one could observe him, but one thing 
was sure, he never brought back any fish. He 
hooted at our coarse hemp lines and three hooks and 
spoons, ordinarily used to troll for pickerel. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 67 

"Hoot, man! why sure, in Ireland if ye put out 
such a line as that — why it's a regular cable! — you'd 
be booted for scaring all the fish away. Try some 
of these fine flies." 

"Oh! well," he was answered, "that's the differ- 
ence between America and Ireland. You would 
have as much use for your horse hairs and silk lines 
here as you would for a horse's tail or a silk dress." 
But he insisted he was right, until I found out he 
was disputing in order to have a j^i'etext for not 
rowing for me, so I had finally to shut him up by 
bidding him keep his tongue and row up. I acknowl- 
edge it was tough work in and out the many turns 
of the sedgy and weeded inlet; and the poor fellow 
was tired enough when we had caught a string of 
some half dozen pickerel in the old-fashioned way. 
In the talk by the way home he told me some curi- 
osities anent the hawks and merlins noble folk yet 
use on the hunt in the old country: "When out, 
they 'hunt' four or five birds apiece; but when the 
hawks get their fill of the hearts and tidbits of their 
prey, they'll stop hunting, short oft'. Why, sir, I've 
shot at a bird, a snipe or grouse, and missed him; 
and a merlin 'd sw^oop down and clutch him before 
he'd touch ground sir! They'll jump down on a 
hare and clinch him with one claw on his neck and 
the other on his back, in a jiff} • ' 

"Ho! talking about hunting, a man from Tracy 
sent me word about training a dog for him, and 
when I charged him $35 for it, I thought he'd let 
me alone. But behold ye, he sends me two, but 
they're not much account." And I did see the dogs 
about — a scabby brace — and hear he was paid, or 
was to be paid, $25 for each one. 



6S SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

yzify ^t/i. — Our part of the storm, gathering for 
two days, has come. Last night at two o'clock we 
were all awakened at the presbytery by the vivid 
lightning in the Northwest and the sharp detona- 
tions. The surplus electricity was well eliminated 
by a good twenty minutes' cannonading, tho' I did 
not take it that the crash was so great or the rever- 
berations so earth-shaking as with us further South, 
among hills and in cities. The nearest bolts meas- 
ured four seconds after the flash. 

The great heat wave is passing South and East; 
the temperature to-day allowing one a drive out in 
a fall surtout, and mildening at this, four A. M. to a 
dampish coolness that is agreeable. I should guess 
the thermometer had not passed 60 degrees, and that 
only for an hour or two. We shall now revert to 
our cool summer weather; warmth prevailing, tem- 
pered by an all but incessant breeze. But these 
extremes are felt by visitors much more sensibly 
than by those more accustomed to them. 

We have had limitless sport over the squabbles 
between the 

Village Worthies 

in and those out of office — the all important office of 
trustees of the municipality. It is about the matter, 
just now, of allowing the Nuns to extend their lines 
down to the lake border by vacating or not vacating 
an intervening street. The feeling of the outsiders 
seems in favor of conceding the Nuns the whole 
property, street and all, with the portion of a hun- 
dred trees in the plantation dignified by the name of 
"park" — more properly a nursery. The village 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 69 

fathers insist that the street must not be touched, 
because it would block out a party or two from the 
other side of the railroad -cut from getting to church; 
and because it would spoil the future drive along the 
lake shore; and because— well, several more potent 
and sapient becauses. Ah! and the Sisters could 
have an under-bridge gangway for private entrance 
secured by decree of the town government, etc. 
The out-politicians put forth patriotic resolutions 
what they will do when they get back into office: 
one saying he will expend $ioo but what the Sisters 
shall have the whole property undivided; another, 
this our man: "All the art of a gardener could not 
make the park conceded available for private use if 
the street be left" — and wanting to know in the 
next breath w^hat plan I would suggest for landscape- 
gardening a plat as large as a calf- paddock. 

More stories for the soldiers and marines about 
our hunter, Nimrod the XXII, averring on his honor 
as a man, that out of twenty -two birds in a flock he 
laid about him until he knocked nineteen and hadn't 
time to put his hand on a bird until he had all but 
exterminated the whole covey! 

Fourth of July — Independence Day at 
FuLDA, Minnesota. 

The unfavorable outset of the morning dampened 
the patriotism of many whose clothes it but slightly 
moistened, in the rare celebration of the Fourth at 
Fulda. I hardly imagine the sunrise caniiorj^ot, 
which was to have been the harbinger^^j>fi!he day 
for the forenoon performances, to have been very 
sure of being carried out. Sure it is, that almost the 



yo SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

whole programme for the first half of the day was 
dispensed with, except the march of the fifty odd 
men who rode out in cavalcade to meet Rt. Rev. 
Dr. Ireland; and then the disposition of the dinner 
where it would do the most good, at meridian. 
Some cannonading and shooting-crackering was the 
voicing of the outburst of patriotism of the noisier 
populace. That cannon, if but small arms, made a 
grand racket withal. The procession in town was 
not an imposing improvisation, for lack principally 
of participants, who, all counted, could muster but a 
baker's half-dozen of vehicles. It was vanguarded 
by a small calibre brass band, somewhat mixed in 
its composition by the control of the tenor being 
throw^n upon a single clarionet. The piping effect 
of the small orchestra under the broad canopy of a 
prairie sky was not agreeably relieved by the solitary 
bycycler running out as on parade with a ten cent 
child's trumpet, at which he would take a solemn 
"ta-ta-taw, ah!" at every presentation of front to the 
line of procession. 

At the order of a sub-marshal, the crowd of men 
and small boys, numbering a score and a half, strag- 
gled on behind the wagons and buggies, but in a 
confused tho' quiet rout. Through all these and 
similar drawbacks, however, the dignified but hearty 
participation of the Bishop of the Church in this 
civic celebration healed many deficiencies — in fact, 
at last made the day a striking success. There was 
taught thereby the proper appreciation of "the glory 
of the liberty of the children of God" in this country, 
if it be not perfect; and it showed how highly bene- 
ficial is the visible effect of bringing out the people 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES, 7 I 

en masse to do honor to religion in its chief repre- 
sentative, and in allying love of country and virtue 
in a common bond. Of many things desirable this 
is strikingly so — that the children of the Church 
should mingle, as far as compatible w^ith their faith 
and socially, with the children of men, and thus in 
all lawful degrees draw them to a reverence for 
earth-blessing and heaven-gaining faith by public 
exhibitions of the alliance and compatibility of true 
love for fatherland here and hereafter. If the vivi- 
fying religious sap permeate not the pores and chan- 
nels of the tree of public life, the juices of earth will 
not nourish at the root what the sun of the skies 
fails to enliven and the rain of heaven to freshen. 
That beautiful continued metaphor of Romans (XI: 
i6, 24) would also teach that the Church is the true 
Olive Tree, rooted, branched, fruitful — the world 
that is even convertible, but the wild olive branches 
grafted or graftable upon her. And if even the 
Church, show defects in individual branches, on her 
human side, her root is sound, incorruptible and un- 
improvable by the insertion of forced growths. 

Whatever was calculated to stimulate a stran- 
ger's risibles was soon over, and the stately figure 
of the Rt. Rev. John Ireland, orator of the occa- 
sion, with his well-worded address of eflfective 
Christian patriotism, gave another turn to the day. 
The towns people had fitted up a large open booth, 
floored, seated, roofed and somewhat decorated in 
the body with garlands and festoons of leaves. 
Some mottoes of "Liberty," "Welcome," "The 
Fourth," in fancy lettering, and a brace of bouquets 
graced the speaker's stand and the organ in front— 



72 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

the former occupied by notables, ecclesiastic and 
lay, the latter environed by its bevy of girls and 
ladies and a triplet of male singers. Songs and band 
pieces introduced the exercises, while the open-air 
hall was filling, and the long space under either eave 
was being enlivened with busts of men and boys — 
sturdy farmers and lads, brawny mechanics, farm 
people, huddled groups. 

The grand, simple and simplv sublime "Declara- 
tion of Independence" being recited in an oratorical 
and emphasized manner by a lawyer (new resident 
of the village), and, of course, whole-souledly ap- 
plauded, the presiding oflScer, Mr. Woolsencroft, 
introduced Dr. Ireland for his oration. Needless to 
say, the eloquence of words and earnestness of man- 
ner was grounded upon great solidity and appropri- 
ateness of Christian and social matter in the address, 
occupying something over an hour in its delivery. 
An accommodating and skillful physician took 
down the address in stenographic characters, and it 
was fully expected we should have a full report ^'in 
perpetuajn rei memof'iam'' for the press to copy 
everywhere, citizens to frame in their homes and 
hand dow^n to their children. Especially was it the 
business of the managing committee to procure and 
distribute copies among the colonists. But after 
months' delay nothing of the kind has been done, 
and we must only console ourselves for the irrepa- 
rable loss by the reflection that those present wxre 
so vividly impressed by the moving eloquence and 
Christian patriotism of their Bishop that they will 
not only remember it to their latest day, but have 
ere this repeated it so often to others that they know 
its substance by heart for future repetition. The 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 73 

rest of the programme was devoted to desultory 
sports, winding up with a dance at 8 P. M., and 
thereafter until the "wee sma' hours.'' The comical 
interspersion of the evening was a race against him- 
self by that singularly prominent bycycle strider, 
who must have tooted his tin trumpet lustily to 
make his hind wheel catch up with his front in the 
contest in which he was the sole visible competitor. 
Maybe the winged Goddess of Liberty waited upon 
him and spurred him like did Minerva of old, to 
add zest to the glory of the Fourth. The but seldom 
rippled gravity with which he had the cheek and 
jowl to blow that horn for the onset must have re- 
mained, as it certainly inaugurated, the most laugha- 
ble bit of humor in all the sports. 

Prairie Drinkers. 
I scarcely know how many, if any, drinkers were 
developed in the course of the evening after the 
dignitaries left. I \wi\\ not, however, conceal the 
truth, that a neighboring, tho' quite small, mostly 
Catholic town showed less soberness than the prac- 
tically non-Catholic one of Fulda. Partially this 
may be accounted for by the fact that the former 
was left without controlling guidance to the unscru- 
pulous fun of a small clique of half-grown boys and 
fellows, whose proof of asserted manhood lay only 
in the exhibition of the quantity of beer they could 
gulp in an out-of-the-way grove, and the racket 
they could raise, what with crackers and pistols, 
what with their brazen-muzzled throats Without 
going into further moralizing on the subject in hand, 
it may be well to state plainly that the best coloniz- 
ers are unanimous in declaring abuse of drink to be 
the greatest enemy of their projects. And we find 



74 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

those most engaged in planting Catholic settlements 
taking a firm stand against intemperance and hold- 
ing up, in general, for total abstinence as the surest 
means to cut oft' even remote temptations from the 
unwary. 

An old word of Rt. Rev. Dr. Ireland comes in 
place: "A Minnesota farmer must work persever- 
ingly and energetically. The man who will appear 
in his field when the sun is high in the sky; who 
must go into the village two or three times a week, 
to lounge around the railway station or the grocery 
store, is sure to fail. I have met specimens of this 
kind, and have heard them too often blaming the 
country for the results of their own idle habits, not 
to wish to meet more of them. * * * There is 
no hope for those who love whisky in our colonies, 
and as we have built no poor-houses they will starve 
on the prairies. We do not want them." With 
whom Mr. John Sweetman, his lay associate in 
colonizing Murray County, is in perfect accord, in 
his letter of December 15, 1S83, when describing the 
qualifications of a settler, especially under his revised 
plan of operations: .... "I shall conclude this by 
warning off' from the prairies one class — drunkards. 

"They cannot succeed. They will surely find their 
way to the nearest village, where the vilest drink is 
always to be found, no matter how much it may 
pretend to be a temperance town with saloons 
strictly prohibited. 

"I warn the families and friends of drunkards that 
the prairie is the worst place for them. They will, 
as I said before, at once find out where drink is to 
be obtained. They will find plenty of congenial 
companions who will surely show them the way to 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 75 

get through their money, no matter how much it 
may be." 

Pity ! shame I rather, that two virtues — the nat- 
ural one of patriotism and rehgion, the epitome of 
all — should be abused by being made the occasion 
of treason against reason and mankind, and sacrilege 
against God and faith! 

yuly 6th. — To-day was raw, with cold north 
wind so disagreeably brought home to our feelings 
thro' a broken pane of glass, that a body would feel 
like going to bed to get warm, as I know of some 
one doing. 

The show of a storm of which we had had signs 
and a slight touch, I just learn, turned out a quite 
serious hurricane at Graceville and on the line south. 
The violent wind leveled several houses, killed a boy 
outright by falling timbers, injured others pretty 
badly, and scared the community at the Northern 
colony, if not out of their wits, severely anyway. 
A wind storm is reported also from parts of Wis- 
consin and Iowa on the same day on which we had 
the fearfully blue signs here, on July 2d. 

A Naming Day. 

yzily ']th. — The weather has come back to its nor- 
mal summer temperature, fair sky, cool winds, 
brigt shine — 

"And the birds make music all the day!" 
And we opened, accordingly, the Nun's pier at 
"Harbor Grace," on their bit of lake shore. They 
enjoyed their first boat ride, with our Cuban, Marie 
Laine, gracefully guiding the rudder. 

It is rather a new-fangled kind of a sail we have 



76 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

fashioned and does not work very well, especially 
in tacking — and the rudder is on a par with the two 
"wings" attached to the side in lieu of a center board. 
But all our company are green sailors and mind so 
little the inconveniences of our old rough-plank 
hulk, that they came back to "Harbor Grace" de- 
lighted. We named our fine points and bays on 
Lake St. Rose to-day. The larger coppice, with 
greater number of shrub trees, we call "Bird Nest," 
because the little ones sing their matins, lands, ves- 
pers and complins there, interspersing their Little 
Hours thro' the long, sweet summer days. This is 
thick and bushy too — fine retreat for their tiny nests 
and nursery for their tender voung, hid away from 
the many kites and hawks. The opposite bay we 
content ourselves with calling "Grove Bay," for the 
quite pretentious set of cottonwoods at Mr. Rad- 
ley's, across the bridge, where picnics are held and 
festive youths while away sunny hours on Sundays 
and off'-days. But the trees are really not more than 
a quarter to a half grown ; and are only dignified by 
the name of a grove by comparison with the lower 
brush along the lake edge. The long, high promon- 
tory, on account ©f an arbor projected there — the 
material brought, the seat already made — we named 
"Arbor Point." But alas! the project came to grief; 
for the carpenter who had a lumber yard discovered 
the materials, and imagining they had been stolen 
packed them, seat and all, away to town. 

The little beach near tow^n is denominated "Park- 
let Beach," for its proximity to the town park; the 
low lands opposite "Arbor," "Meadows"; the turn 
of the elbow-shaped point beyond the outlet, "Point 
Marie." We tried to find some appropriate point 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 77 

for the name of "Sharon" in honor of our Nuns of 
the Holy Child's superb Institute near Philadelphia, 
but could not succeed in pleasing ourselves. The 
most beautiful spot and the nearest to being a hill 
would be the fine, sloping knoll back of "Arbor 
Point," in fact, inckiding it; and some day when a 
large College, for instance, or great Western Indus- 
trial School, shall have been established there, 
overlooking the town and rolling prairies, the lake 
and its then deeply wooded shores, we shall come 
together and name it beautiful "Sharon Hill." 



I was shown to-day a flax plant nearly two and 
a half feet in height, already flowered and seeding. 
It was proof of the push of this rich soil. 



Towards night yesterday evening, an ugly black 
waste of clouds poured over the sky from the North- 
west to the Southeast, like routed, retreating cavalry, 
smoking with straggling mists of perspiration — all 
succeeding a day of glorious shine and fairness. 
With but two words of change, it is the picture pre- 
sented by one of the Shakspearean sonnets I have 
been conning these two days: 

"Sunshine and Cloud." 
"Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the (prairie wilds) with sovereign eye, 
Kissing with golden face the meadow gi-een, 
Gilding pale (lakes) with heavenly alchemy; 
Anon, permit the basest clouds to ride 
With ugly rack on his celestial face, 
And from the forlorn world his visage hide, 
Stealing unseen to West with his disgrace." 



78 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Again this morning the picture was reversed, 
and the day ends with a heaven full of glorious sun- 
set colors, bright yellow above the royal couch, like 
freshest sammets and corded hangings of lustrous 
silk. A bank and promontory in front of crimson; 
up sky, orange. Far over the zenith, rose and rich 
red, paling all until the curtains immediately above 
the setting glowed with last bright orange. And 
in the open heavens, delicate beading w^ith exquisite 
blue between, and the indefinable light that is all 
but unearthly, calling on to the beyond. 

One would be tempted to outrage astronomy by 
imao^ininor the Aurora Borealis reflected some of the 
splendor of its fiery coloring on the burnished morn 
and eve, so full of fire they show. Indeed, the rise 
and set are both removed from their normal latitude, 
as compared with further south; the sun seeming to 
come up inside of northeast and set north of north- 
west — certainly due northeast and west. 

Celestial Glories. 

yuly ^th. — How can we pass ovei; this celestial 
glory without giving fit praise to the Eternal Artist, 
the God of Beauty! If these be but reflections from 
His sun's face, how much more of His own. Fount of 
loveliness! It was half an hour before sunset, and 
clear oft' in the southeast. Three grand mountains 
of clouds! Behind them the most brilliant station- 
ary range of great shelves of rock, like precious 
stones from the foundations of the celestial citv, 
wherein numberless caves recede, well defined in 
shaded lines of beauty. 

These Titanic rosy and sapphire recesses are par- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 79 

apetted in front against the immense walls of coral 
rock looming up behind and around, whose higher 
receding gorges and culminating peaks are filled 
and capped with heaps of vapor-snow. The white 
laps of the skyey Alps throw out the deeper colors 
of the rocks and mountain flanks in such enchanting 
contrasts of lightsome shadings over the fairy caves, 
that we cry out with exultation : " My God ! how 
beautiful must Thy light be to reflect such scenes to 
fallen earth and mortal eyes!" 

Before this heavenly background two opposing 
glorious panoramas of mountain-clouds move ma- 
jestically into and past one another. These proces- 
sions are not illumed, rather darkish blue and shaded 
to define themselves in every feature against the 
background. Every shifting of the sky scenes by 
the fair-weathoj* angels call forth renewed expres- 
sions of delight. Finally, a magnificent rosy peak 
of light coral ascends above the-snow banks and 
blue, higher and higher — bends over more than the 
sculptured town of Pisa until — inirabile dictu! the 
base gives way and the mighty eminence seems 
ready to topple. It does not. It only breaks oft' 
and floats upwards self-sustaining, like the "pillar 
and base of truth," figure of the supernatural Church, 
as described by the great Louis Veuillot. Under- 
mined from below by the machinations of secret 
societies and apostate kings and baseless upon earth, 
she still stands majestic aloft, upborne by an invisi- 
ble power and sustained of God. 

After a half-hour the dim blue ranges float past 
one another and leave the rose caves and coral reefs, 
the mountain snows in the laps of the towering 



8o SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Ossa-upon-Pelion, in their scarcely dimmed celes- 
tialness. The god of day descends and shedding 
the hght of his face over all the the western firma- 
ment hides his flaming forehead behind his barred 
cloud-prison. '''•Et U7nbrae ex cacufnlnibus montiiun 
. . . cadebant^' 

There are left in the opposing sky but the ghosts 
of the whilom Alps — the ashes of the heavenly 
burnings, smouldering, yet not consuming. The 
informing lightning passes sw^iftly into the dull 
masses, heaped like charred paper, and shoots and 
quivers in ascending river-like tongues, sheeting the 
now^ d^ark caves with sudden gold — flashing up be- 
yond them into the darkening ether, blazing up in 
the mountains of ashes. 'Tis a brighter glory than 
that departed, because it is life from within, not a 
reflection from without. Such might be the soul 
after the splendors of earth are past — splendors that 
are but reflected, exterior, temporal, until the in- 
forming fire of hidden grace makes the dead man 
live, and the undying spirit flame but the brighter 
from the ashy corpse. 

Crops and Gardens. 

yuly loth. — I saw a field of small standing oats 
headed out. More grass is ready for the mower. 
It is continuous and new grass harvest on the prairie 
from about the first third of June, in good summers, 
on till nearly the end of October. As the increasing- 
sun successively dries up the lower lands and in- 
vades the sloughs, one by one, the new crops succeed 
one another. I verily believe, and am sustancd by 
some practical farmers, that there could be three hay 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. bl 

harvests, taking two months each between the cut- 
tings. Those prairie farmers who are raising cattle 
principally make it a business to cut and press hay, 
selling it to large buyers at the railroad towns or 
shipping it to large cities. 

I noted particularly and measured by eye some 
grass and vegetation roots in a caved-in ledge of the 
lake. The fibres of the roots run down below the 
two-and-one- half or three-foot loam into the gravelly 
dirt; the longest reached as low as four feet. And 
certainly nature must make provision by putting the 
roots belo^v ordinary freezing depth, and make 
allowances for the extraordinary. Here in midsum- 
mer we are eating the finest radishes. They are 
firm, brittle and from as large as the ham of your 
thumb to the sinaller, as big as your fore or middle 
finger. Lettuce is still coming on fresh, and young 
onions are not run out. I ate a few strawberries 
some days ago; but my particular treat of the deli- 
cacy was as remarkable for its acidity as for its 
rarity. Some wild ones also have been eaten by the 
Nuns and pronounced palatable. The better pota- 
toes have blossomed, and I have heard some two 
farmer's wives boast they would have new potatoes 
for the Fourth of July. Maybe they did. Corn, 
the best, is now about a foot high, and generally 
looks thrifty. 

Far-seeing people w^ho are industrious will raise 
all the vegetables they can; and the enormous quan- 
tities they can produce from even an ordinary gar- 
den plot in this soil will keep them jumping to 
clear the fast growing weeds and wild grasses; but 
in the end yield them all they can house for the 



82 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

longer winter one may expect. This is the paradise 
of gardeners and root raisers. 

Twin City of the North. 

yuly i(^th. — I have been eight days in the North- 
ern Metropohs; and, Httle as I Hke cities as com-' 
pared with the purer country, I am more and more 
astounded at the marvelous development of this 
Western New York and Brooklyn, called St. Paul 
and Minneapolis. Their rivalry is something on a 
grand scale; the differences of business they claim, 
severally, run into the sum of seven or eight millions 
in a short time, and their house building amounts to 
from 1,500 to 2,000 structures going up simultane- 
ously in each place, winter and summer. The tvv^o 
cities combined are said to rank about third in the 
United States in the matter of general business; and 
when their but four-mile-separated suburbs join, as 
they are continually tending to do, the possibilities of 
the future Twin City at the head of Mississippi navi- 
gation, in reach of the great lakes and midway of the 
continent from every direction, are simply incalcu- 
lable. But let some one else chronicle cities. 

How glad I am to get back to my prairie with its 
simple beauty, its peaceful rest, its better friends — 
back to my letters from friends and good children. 

"Oh, who would inhabit this bleak world alone!" 
Yes, but some are most alone when in greatest 
crowds. It is my weakness, or strength. It is not 
so much the Thomas a Kempian reason: "The more 
I converse with men the less I return a man," tho' 
that be partially the personal truth; but modern 
civilization, as understood and professed practically 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 83 

in our business cities, is so mechanical, wooden, 
stony, iron. There is the eternal sameness of great 
dead, smoked walls and smoking roofs and filthy 
streets; the elbowing madness of rushing crowds; 
the ever anxious brow and bent body of the seeker 
of Mammon's favors ; the horrid squalor of poverty 
and pinched faces beside the palatial, park-environed 
homes of the princes of fortune. Like the poor 
famishing Arab in the desert who found a bag, and 
hoping to Allah it were dates or figs, discovered it 
full of miserable baubles of pearls, one finds but 
machinery, hard money, man-culture, and no foun- 
tain of living waters, in the hearts of great cities. 
And tho' we must not judge harshly and must look 
below the seething surfaces of the sea of tossed 
mankind for the real pearls and coral caves and 
painted shells in its depths, still I could not refrain 
from apostrophizing: "Ye simply flowered prairies; 
ye pellucid lakes and clear-breasted waters; ye living 
in the grasses and rushes; soarers on high, mewing, 
whistling, trilling, warbling tribes; ye waving tree- 
lets and low shrubs, I greet ye all again and rejoice 
with you in the commonest, best gifts of the sweet 
God of Nature, blest be His name!" 

Southeastern Minnesota. 

Going back and forth to the Mississippi along the 
Southern line of railroad last week, I found the 
prairie crops about the same as in Murray County. 
No corn is past plowing or "laid by." Some headed 
oatfields and a little headed wheat, west of Mankato. 

Garden truck is in its first summer yield; a few 
stuck peas and beans, potatoes about all blossomed. 



84 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

but some considerably bug-eaten, and scarcely any 
messes of new ones. Haying is going on pretty 
extensively and the yield is fair, even often abundant 
on good, vs^ell-tended farms. I understand some 
barley and rye is being cut, and I saw fields yellow- 
ing and goldening for the sickle. 

Advancing past Mankato to the East into the 
wooded prairies and forty-mile belt of timber along 
the Mississippi, things are considerably more ad- 
vanced than on the open prairies. All the wheat 
and oats are headed out and filling fast for the har- 
vest, coming on in two or three weeks. There is 
more hay and the meadows are evener and better, 
tho' the grass is not so heavy as on the prairie, or as 
the slough grass. Corn, in several fields, is plowing 
for the last time or actually "laid by" — tho' the 
greater portion seen from the track is not higher 
than the prairie product; say, averaging some twen- 
ty-two to twenty-five inches. Patches, however, of 
garden and field corn will reach three and one-half 
or four feet, and I have heard of stalks standing six 
or seven feet. As usual in our Western World, 
people do not pay half attention to farm gardens, 
too anxious to get at the more money-producing 
crops to raise necessary vegetables for their own 
consumption, not to speak of sale. Few or no gar- 
dens are apparent in smaller towns here, tho' more 
in larger burgs and extensive villages. In this latter, 
I saw stuck peas standing waist and breast high. 
Potatoes generally are luxuriant and clean of bugs; 
pretty fair cabbage and beets; lots of great under- 
growth of rhubarb, currants and gooseberries. The 
two last grow also wild on the prairie lakes and 
vield tolerable berries. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 85 

In the vegetable markets of St. Paul, you find any 
quantity of fresh early vegetables, past the middle of 
July; young succulent onions, lettuce, strawberries, 
carrots, beets, cauliflower, head -big cabbage, fist-big 
turnips, single or double-fisted new potatoes; abun- 
dance of small flower bouquets of flesh' colored roses, 
crimson and purple fuchsias, Sweet Williams, etc. 



Lake Minnetonka. 

yuly \6th — Our orphan's excursion from Minne- 
apolis to-day recalls an episode of last year at this 
time — just the prime season to enjoy a run out to 
Minnetonka, the superbest lake in Southern Min- 
nesota. 

The rail route is very attractive. You rush thro' 
the suburbs of Minneapolis, the city of the level 
as compared with the more ascending St. Paul, 
past the fine lakes Calhoun, on the right, and the 
quieter, because less frequented, Harriet, and sum- 
mer resorts for campers especially, on the beautiful 
left. Native woods line the road, and you pick, as 
you have a chance between stops, the wild flowers 
along the cuts. The country opens as you approach 
the vicinity of the station of Wayzata, by one direc- 
tion, or the lake-town of Excelsior by another. 

Up-hill and down-vallev charms meet you at 
many turns, peculiarlv reminding of the Ohio River 
scenery, or the less diversified valley of the Mo- 
hawk, in Central New York. The new "Belle of 
Minnetonka," or the great "St. Louis," comes steam- 
ing up with flags of many nations fluttering at the 
bulwarks. The irregular shores bend in and out. 



86 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

aftbrding a variety of shifting scenes for hours', nay 
days', ride back and forth of the twenty odd miles 
traversed from navigable end to end, or the over-a- 
hundred miles of the circumference of the shore. 
Now little, then longer, pleasure crafts and tugs 
pass and repass like verv gondolas, only more cheer- 
ful far. 

How those wooded points project graceful into 
the lake, throwing into prominence the villas, peep- 
ing out with ornamental frieze and cornice and tur- 
rets from the foliage, perched on their blue-grass 
plots. Ho! another pleasure party salutes us on the 
right, and "hails" are exchanged between the merry- 
goers. These return- as we go out, and leave us the 
"Narrows" free. Pretty narrow indeed ! A row of 
slender piles stake off the space, just barely broad 
enough for the hull of our steamer. Right oft' there 
looms the grand "Lafayette" Hotel, a monstrous 
pile of hundreds of rooms — all outside rooms — in 
the curious Qiieen Anne style of architecture, and 
painted the oddest green and iDcnitentiary brown. 
But it is elegantly appointed, and you mav surfeit 
your rage for expenditure by paying five dollars a 
day — or even as much a meal, as was actually charged 
on the opening occasion. 

The "St. Louis" is not so expensive, but still a 
large establishment. A dozen other hotels dot the 
shores and people the islands. A "cute" little island, 
with vined summer-house and trellised residence, is 
romantic enough for an idyl; and there it peers sheer 
out of the water, just broad enough to have no 
neighbors. 

A "fish" is the order of the evening, and the ex- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 87 

pert can land his string of bass, delicate croppies, 
or wall-eyed pike, and grosser pickerel. Again, as 
vve work our easy way back thro' the bays and 
"Narrows," the resemblance to the "Beautiful River" 
scenery is so marked you exclaim involuntarily, as 
I heard a cultured lady do: "This is verily a section 
of the Ohio Valley!" But the air is perfect, and 
puts on a charm not felt elsewhere. 

This i6th July, we went out excursioning with 
the orphans and children on Lake Minnetonka — a 
ride on its wind-blown bosom from ii A. M. to 2 P. 
M. Tho' grand it be, with fine points, harbors, 
islands and promontories, as I have described it, 
Minnetonka has not the ethereal beauty of the White 
Bear, or even little St. Rose, or Buffalo Lake on the 
prairies. And to-day, with the gale of wind making 
it uncomfortable, it does not impress me as it did 
last year. Captain Hill, the proprietor of the colos- 
sal Lafayette, has been working very hard to make 
this a great summer resort, even going to the length 
of establishing a special railroad line; and eventually, 
for the rich, it will be brought to wide public notice. 
It has had fewer guests this season; perhaps all the 
visitors would not aggregate two hundred and fifty 
or three hundred, and it takes many times these to 
support the expensive and elegant establishments. 



July iS^/i. — The Great Artist seems, to-day, to 
have his colors on the pallet of the sky only in pro- 
cess of mixing. There is still a varying beauty in 
the irregular dabs here and there of clotted whites, 
creams and shaded heaps, all this neutral day. To- 
w^ards twilio^ht the skvful is tinted faintlv, fairlv. 



88 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

On visiting the land office of C. St. P. M. and 
O. R. R., we were shown by the general agent, 
Mr. Drake, the grand sale of 105,000 acres, extend- 
ing in alternate sections from the Murray County 
line, south of lona, on to past Adrian, Nobles County, 
for '"^5.35 an acre, to the English syndicate of Close 
Bros. A curiosity of the minor purchases by indi- 
viduals are two whole sections bought by the 
Protestant i\rchbishop of York, in England. The 
sale is for cash, over $600,000, and includes every- 
thing as it comes; and I hajDpen to know from an 
extended trip over the identical region, that there 
are entire sections of rather hopeless sloughs, and 
others of sandhills, fit perhaps for sheep grazing. 
The entire purchase is about twenty miles square. 
Mr. Drake informed us that in a week he expected 
to close a similar sale of fifty thousand acres in Mur- 
ray County, trenching on the environs of Avoca and 
Fulda; ^6.^0 an acre will be the price. These are 
some of the best wholesale trades in land made in 
this or the neighboring States or Territories in a 
great while; and include, as to the first in Nobles 
County, the precise lands once held by the Catholic 
Bureaus of Colonization, but of which never an acre 
was sold. 

■ Avoca, Midnight, yuly 19-30. — The full moon's 
face is obscured by the drifting clouds from the 
Southeast, but gives good light withal. In the North 
is shown a startling display of electricity among the 
banked and piled ranges of cloud- mountains, as 
''Alps on Alps arise." The noiseless lightning now 
blazes out into a sun, as quickly extinguished; now 
flashes into rivers and darts in bolts — incessant. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 89 

changeful, lighting and going out, revealing the 
cloudy heights, caves, chasms. Glorious, unearthly! 
Great, my God, is Thy majesty! I gaze v^ith awe — 
with no fear, but of a son. "Incline, O Lord, unto 
my aid! Lord, make haste to help me!" 

This week two more spots are growing in the 
sun, making the number now not less than seven. 
Storms are predicted. On the 13th there were 
cyclonic winds, and twelve or thirteen electric 
storms in different localities from New Jersey and 
New Hampshire west to Montana, and from Mis- 
souri north to Canada. We are coming to pretty 
decided proofs that the electrical center is at the 
North Pole, and that the sun spots portend trouble 
in our air. 

yuly 20th. — To-day will witness about our last 
fish. We trolled and bobbed over all the lowev end 
of the lake the other day, and caught one miserable 
catfish. And w^e have w^'ought our w^ay into the 
inlet thro' the growling weeds and beds of w4iite 
blossoms (called aquatica something by botanists), 
and for our two hours' ^vork brought out a single 
pike. Some other fishers caught tw^o, and two others 
again a small string. The old-time dozens are no 
more. 

The fields about our colony are finely advanced. 
Wheat is fully headed, and the ears taste of the 
"dough." Oats are much farther matured, and begin 
to whiten over the fields. Some L'ish Barbary seed 
counts 135 to 130 oats to the stalk. Wheat heads 
measure, some five, some six inches. Corn is still 
backward in farms whose owners are not much used 
to it, and value it too little. Much will hardlv sur- 



9© SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

vive the early frosts. I noticed some fine-looking 
barley patches headed and flossed heavily No 
amount is raised hereabouts. I just heard of a good 
field of grain ready for the machines in two weeks. 
yuly2ist. — To-day opens with an unusual visitor — 
a genuine heavy fog, that obscures the view of the 
lake to even now at 8 A. M. Large drops of rain 
exude from out the thick damp, and still the bee- 
martins flit and hover; twit-twats chatter; sea-birds 
cry and me\y, and the cat-bird calls to merry heart 
from the tangles of the bush banks. During the 
obscurity let us speculate for a page on water. 
Tho' I believe with my "Nature Remedy" man — 
Dr. Felix Oswald, posing in the "Popular Science 
Monthly" as the physician — in the use of water, I 
would not coincide in his strong condemnation of 
warm drink or hot water, for a great many chronic 
suflerers. Get the water into you anyway and any- 
how; it is the best of elements for recuperation and 
cleansing the system, besides being absolutely neces- 
sary in some form or other to every kind of animal. 
Writing for health seekers as a special class in my 
interested readers, I ^vould not deprive them of the 
follow^ing thoroughly scientific resume: 

The Hot Water Treatment. 

"Dr. Eph. Cutter, in Gaillard's Journal, describes 
the system of administering hot water, as originally 
practiced by James H. Salisbury, of Philadelphia. 
As this hot water treatment is receiving some atten- 
tion by the public as well as the profession, the sa- 
lient points are here reproduced : 

The Salisbury System of Using Hot Water. — i. 
The water must be hot ; not cold or lukewarm. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 9I 

This is to excite downward peristalsis of the aHmen- 
tary canal. Cold water depresses, as it uses animal 
heat to bring it up to the temperature of the econ- 
om\% and there is a loss of nerve force in this pro- 
ceeding. 

Lukewarm water excites upward peristalsis or 
vomiting, as is well known. By hot water is 
meant a temperature of no degrees to 115 degrees 
F., such as is commonly liked in the use of tea and 
coffee. In cases of diarrhoea the hotter the better. 
In cases of hemorrhages, the temperature should be 
at blood heat. Ice water is disallowed in all cases, 
sick or well. 

2. Quantity of Hot Water at a Draught. — Dr. 
Salisbury first began with one-half pint of hot water, 
but he found it ^vas not enough to wash out 

3. Times of Taking Hot Water. — One hour to 
two hours before each meal, and half an hour before 
retiring to bed. 

At first Dr. Salisbury tried the time of one hour 
before meals, but this was apt to be followed by 
vomiting. One hour to two hours allows the hot 
water time enough to get out of the stomach before 
the food enters or sleep comes, and thus avoids vom- 
iting. Four times a day gives an amount of hot 

water sufficient Should the patient be 

thirsty between meals, eight ounces of hot water can 
be taken an}' time between two hours after a meal, 
and one hour before the next meal. This is to avoid 
diluting the food in the stomach with water. 

4. Mode of Taking the Hot Water. — In drinking 
the hot water it should be sipped, and not drunk so 
fast as to distend the stomach and make it feel un- 



92 SIX SEASONS OX OUR PRAIRIES, 

comfortable. From fifteen to twenty minutes may 
be consumed during the drinking of the hot water. 

5. The Length of Time to Continue the Use of 
Hot Water. — Six months is generally required to 
wash out the liver and intestines thoroughly." 

This is required in the understanding that the 
treatment is used, as the basis of a cure, in a chronic 
case of any kind; and when the patient will be pa- 
tient, especiall}^ as he can suit the water to his taste, 
as follows: 

"6. Additions to Hot Water. — To make it palata- 
ble, in case it is desired, and medicate the hot water, 
aromatic spirits of ammonia, clover tea blossoms, 
ginger, lemon juice, sage, salt, and sulphate of mag- 
nesia are sometimes added. Where there is intense, 
thirst and dryness, a pinch of chloride of calcium or 
nitrate of potash may be added to allay thirst and 
leave a moistened film over the parched and dry 
mucous membrane surfaces. When there is diar- 
rhoea, cinnamon, ginger, and pepper may be boiled 
in the water, and the quantity drunk lessened. For 
constipation a teaspoonful of sulphate of magnesia 
or one-half teaspoonful of taraxicum may be used in 
the hot water. 

7. Aniount of Liquid to be drunk at a Meal. — Not 
more than eight ounces. This is in order not to 
dilute the gastric juice or wash it out prematurely, 
and thus interfere with the digestive processes. 

8. The effects of drifiking hot water as indicated 
are the improved feelings of the patient. The fieces 
become black with bile washed down its normal 
channel. This blackness of faeces lasts for more 
than six months, but the intolerable fetid odor of 



SIX WEEKS IX OUR ROCKIES. 93 

ordinary faeces is abated and the smell approximates 
the odor of healthy infants suckling healthy breasts; 
and this shows that the ordinary nuisance of fetid 
faeces is due to the want of washing out and cleans- 
ing the alimentary canal from its fermenting contents. 
The urine is clear as champagne, free from deposit 
on cooling, or odor, i.oi:; to i.o3o specific gravity 
like infant's urine. The • sweat starts freely after 
drinking, giving a true bath from the center of body 
to periphery. The skin becomes healthy in feel and 
looks " 

And if any one objects to the infusion of so much 
liquid, tell him he is, like yourself, seventy-five per 
cent, water. x\dd, hot water is almost the only safe 
specific for the physical reformation of inebriates. 

Regarding the purity of the water on the prairies, 
it may be safely averred that the contents of rivers, 
lakes and even of sloughs, are tasteless, colorless and 
wholesome, for the eleven out of the tw^elve months 
of the year. This odd month is in the end of June 
and in July, being the only exceptional time when 
more stationary waters show signs of impuritv bv 
scum or bad odor, as it is the ordinarily hottest sea- 
son in this latitude. There are, indeed, special local- 
ities after you leave the middle line of Minnesota 
and Dakota, where you find some lakes and stagnant 
river bottoms alkalined to such a degree as to require 
boiling before their water can be used for drinking 
or cooking. 

Wells and cisterns, which are properly boxed, 
(they generally call the lining with jointed pine 
"curbing,") and carefully dug, either entirely above, 
or far below, the blue or black clay strata, furnish 
unexceptionably good water. 



94 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

We do not, however, include the plains proper as 
distinguished from the prairies; for the latter at 
higher altitudes often have no escape from alkali 
and other had elements excepJt by boring the fine 
artesian wells. 



There is the least here in summer or early 
autumns, of 

"The melancholy days .... the saddest of the year." 

A dash of rain and a grow^l of thunder dissipated 
the gloom in a jifFy: such in short is the sequel of 
the fog spell w^e are now^ thro' — all gone while I 
would write out these water pages. 



How beautiful to see the heavenly prayers of the 
Missal verified, so frequently, to the letter, in the 
Convent of these good Nuns of the Holy Child 
Jesus, some of whom go to Holy Communion nearly 
every day, and all several times in the week. The 
celebrant so often reads prayers of the Post Com- 
munion especially referring to the family of the 
faithful present, who have that day participated with 
him of the Sweet Mysteries of the Divine Table; 
and alas! seldom is there one to share them with 
him and make true the blessings called down upon 
the communicants. Against one and all anyways 
Jansenistically inclined, one must heartily believe in 
frequent w^orthy feeding upon our Lord, "the Way, 
the Truth and the Life," the Viatecum of wayfarers 
by the Truth towards Life that is, and shall never 
be swallowed up in death; more notably for many 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. • 95 

religious who share in part with the priest in the 
New Law some of the ordinary privileges of the 
Holy of Holies, within the sanctuary veil. 

July 2^th. — Our occupation for a few days has 
been the plying of the trade of the Apostles in sail- 
making. We have indeed but a sorry hulk of a 
flat-bottomed, rough-board, lockless sort of a boat. 
And we are inexperienced enough tradesmen and 
sailors. Our first trial showed our ignorance of the 
craft. We had no breeze, and it was perhaps a 
blessing; for with our poor tackle we might have 
found the nearest land, as the Irish wag suggested, 
straight under us. 

To-day opens fine, sunshine, clear lake, good air. 
But, all of a sudden, a dense fog arises, creeps over 
from the East and down from lake head, and we are 
enveloped. By a quarter to eight it is lightlier, and 
the sun struggles to launch thro' his glittering spears. 
Some predict these fogs, if they continue, will 
shorten the grain crop, which God forefend! 

Two Prairie Pets. 

We have caught a couple of pets lately. I got hold 
of a fire-eating, full-blooded yellow-head, an irrepres- 
sible grain-preyer. He could scarcely fly a rod, 
having been disabled somehow, and being young be- 
sides; but had sharp claws, snappy beak, and would 
fight you as literally as he could, even in his ad- 
vanced pin feathers, with tooth and nail. He has a 
scolding caw, something like a soreheaded crow's. 
Indeed he resembles the famous marauder mate- 
rially, and is, like him, a great pest to corn. 
They not only pick the grains and ears, but league 



96 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

with the rascally gophers — the little striped, short- 
tailed prairie squirrel — in pulling up whole acres of 
young corn sprouts. 

Then, a townsman has what he calls his "canary," 
tied with a strong twine about the leg to a stake in 
his back yard. This singer's legs are all of twelve 
inches high, and he stands, in his brown coat and 
dun leggins, over two feet in his tight boots. He is 
somewhat knock-kneed, by reason of his youth and 
infirmities, having been left on the prairie by his 
unfeeling three-and-a-half foot parents to the use- 
lessness of his legs and tender wings — neither able 
to locomote nor even help himself up on his gaunt 
limbs when he once gets down. He is, namely, a 
young ostrich of these parts — an infant sandhill 
crane with a "peep," "peep," quite like a tiny chick. 
His main body is deep brown with under wings of 
dirty blue; his head is fuzzy, light brown, pin-feath- 
ered, lighted by an eye perfectly round, of beautiful 
brown, as large and with as distinct a pupil and iris 
as a man. His beak, with decided pecking inclina- 
tion, is long and tapering — about five inches. 

We have been eating our unhoed and once- 
plowed potatoes for a week, and the Sisters are 
getting some sparse first fruits from their unculti- 
vated garden. The tubers are pestered by the bugs, 
but it is rather late to harm much, except perhaps in 
the size of the roots. 

Very pretty wild tiger lilies (red) have been found, 
and have graced our chapel altar many mornings. 

July 2^th. — After several days busy with other 
matters, we resume our journal to note that there 
has been grreat racket — "fuss and feathers," we 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 97 

might put it, if it were just that — on the raih'oad 
these three or four days. The train has been bring- 
ing back six, eight and more empty cars from a spot 
up north from Avoca, where a new town named 
Wilson is building. Its projector is a man evicted by 
his tenants, they say, in Ireland, who came over to 
buy and possess a town, all his own. The railroad 
needs all the paying stations it can raise to keep up 
rolling stock, and pay a small surplus over running 
expenses. Hadley bids fair to become a good grain 
station. Slaton is pretentious enough to have fought 
in its baby clothes for the assertion of its eligibility 
for the county seat, and came near "lobbying" thro'. 

A Well or Two. 

There have been several wells dug in our town- 
ship lately. It is a very simple process. The borers 
erect a three-legged derrick, with block and tackle, 
whence a windlass lets down an auger a foot or two 
in diameter. Two men turn the auger with hand 
spikes, boring down thro' the soft loam sand, and 
sometimes gravel, then blue and black clay, for say, 
fifteen or sixteen feet, and meet veins of water in 
abundance. The depth of blue clay is as far as you 
ordinarily bore; if you stir it up you are forced to 
bore thro' it, often from sixteen to forty feet. It is 
dry, hard, impermeable matter, stops the flow of 
water, and has the reputation of spoiling the wells, 
where it holds contact with the water. Wells are 
dug and "curbed," that is, planked down the sides, 
for eighty or ninety cents a foot. The Nuns' well 
is some ninety feet deep, and has given trouble on 
account of "seeps" making the water offensive. 



98 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

These are two most glorious days we have just 
enjoyed, sunshiny, but cool and bracing, delightfully 
full of the tonic that gives vigor and health. Such 
is Minnesota's finest and peculiar wxather, inspiring 
these strictly descriptive verses: 

MINNESOTA'S SUMMER CLIME. 

Now perfect-mixt of climes, 

Of all that sweeten air or earth bedeck, 

Thy crispy summer times 

Thine angel saved from Eden's wreck. 

As is thy sheen of stars 

From out thy depths of limpid blue; 
As spring sun's glinting bars 

The earth and spirit's strength renew: 

So seems it me these days 

Come down from ether's starry height, 

Descending on the rays 

"Sky-tinted waters" mirror white. 

In summer solstice e'en 

When burn the ardors evermore, 
Sweet breath of snow, I ween. 

Thou breathest from the Arctic shore. 

Wild flowers, thy frequent spring — 
Thy soil, quick fruits and later, yields: 

Lands, lakes invite the wing 

Of birds and men to quickening fields. 

To sanitarium, thee. 

From genial clime and country come 
Strong, sick, the bond and free, 

Wealth- seeking — refuge, health and home! 

Taylor's Falls on the St. Croix. 

Not far from as lovely a day as this, tho' vastly 
hotter, was it last summer, when a party of four of 



Six WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 99 

US crossed the lake-river at Stillwater, Minnesota, 
and passing over to Hudson, on a primitive flat of a 
steam ferry, steamed up the St. Croix River to the 
famous Dalles, or Taylor's Falls. Next time, how- 
ever, we beg to have better transport than afforded 
by that poor little steam-run concern, called by cour- 
tesy a pleasure boat. 

The St. Croix here is a narrow strip of water, 
rather on the order of a series of ponds, so very 
shallow in places we had to tack every fashion to 
get the junk ahead. On one stretch we called up 
all hands and actually poled our way for some rods; 
and when we came to the great log boom (this being 
the ordinary channel for logging from the contigu- 
ous forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin) we were 
checked completely and forced to halt until word 
could be got by skiffs to stop the booming, or "boom- 
up," as the technicals say. Finally, with the sun 
driving us from one side of the slender craft, we 
sweated our way up, and were well rewarded by 
the fresher mountain-like air breathed thro' the 
Dalles, and by the sight of the finest rock scenery of 
perhaps both States. The singularity -of rougher, 
rockier sections in the midst of the plains and prai- 
ries, rolling for hundreds on hundreds of miles on 
either side, makes the Dalles more interesting features 
of landscape. How the word "Dalles," meaning 
flat or table rock, came to be applied to these 
great gorges of piled walls, is hard to conjecture; 
except that, perhaps, it refers to the actual building 
of the masses, seemingly in horizontal lines and as 
if piled one flat surface on another in the manner 
somewhat of human constructions. There are up- 



lOO SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

wards of five miles of more or less elevated sites and 
shapes, the "Devil," as usual in the rather profanely 
famous West, getting more than his share of prom- 
inence by standing sponsor for rocks, chairs, bowels 
and slides. 

Here you see a great bend in the rapid Falls, en- 
walled by sheer precipices rising boldly and irregu- 
larly on both shores: now forming a grand Giant- 
causeway front, now breaking into large points and 
minor peaks. Across the falls, between the two 
embryo towns, both finely situated and embowered 
in stately trees and evergreens, spans an arching 
bridge, setting oft' the natural scenery to an unusual 
degree. Bridges are always beautiful, whatever it is 
that consitutes the quality; but in wild gorges like 
these nothing satisfies the sensation-nerve of the 
beautiful so fully. 

Down in the Dalles fishing smacks row to and fro 
in the eddying waters; and far down, the musical 
echo brings back, perfected in Nature's grand organ, 
the shouted song and whistle, the forced exploding 
laughter and "yodel." We climbed the rugged 
roads above the Minnesota town and explored the 
vicinage with cautious foot and rapid eye. No easy 
task! The brushing underwood is massy and the 
steeps made for goats or acrobats. Strange ! we 
found, as it were, great bored cisterns, as circular as 
if done by human machinery, but evidently worn so 
by eddying pools, carrying, doubtless, granite and 
flint bowlders, for centuries of fret. One exceeded 
the other in singular imitation of human craft, and 
we lingered examining them. 

Once out on the rocks overlooking- the lower Falls, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. lOI 

we enjoyed a view worth double our toil and moil. 
The river, clear as all mountain streams are clear, 
wound down between the Nature-built walls of fine 
browned and mossed rock; the banks now lowering, 
now rising in beauteous change. We shouted and 
sang to the Echo; and the Echo talked long and 
sweetly back, ever agreeing to all our moods. 

But what a night we passed at the hotel in the 
poor quarters assigned us directly under a mansard 
roof, heated during the day to past boiling point! 
At least it made us boil and froth over with the 
lathers of perspiration it cooked out of us, especially 
some rather portly ecclesiastics, whose stock in trade 
of entertainment amounted to doleful groans over 
the sultry heat, interspersed with frequent mop- 
pings. I happen to know even one spare body who 
deserted his bed for the hall, and steamed there as if 
afire. 



Avoca, yuly 2Q)th. — I have heard of barley and 
rye being harvested in the past week, some of extra- 
ordinary growth. Garden corn is tasseled in lo- 
calities. This morning, the park-garden's corn 
(hardly more than voluntary) is tasseling at less 
than three feet; tho' the stalks look thick and 
healthy, barring that the leaves are too close. A 
few stands are silking. 

The weather has been varying; for two weeks 
cool, but warm, even sultry, after dinner for a short 
time, breeding some night musquitoes. Yesterday 
was rather cold. To-day is bright and sweet, with 
good northwest breeze. 



I02 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

On St. Anne's eve we trimmed and set our sail 
boat, launching her under the name of the feast, 
"Santa Anna." The wind was north by a little 
west, and we had to pull over with oars to the 
north shore in order to get a start. We cruised a 
half mile at a brisk run. We spied a batch of wild 
ducks on the upper lake, perhaps some five dozen. 
Good omen for opening of the season on August 15. 
A few will kill game in the closed time, but they 
get little good out of it; as breeding fowl are strong 
of flavor and lean, they are quite unfit to eat. 




A Run into Dakota and Iowa, 




EFORE we detail the account of the Six 
^ Weeks in the Mountains, we find this a suit- 
^able intervening space for a more general 
description of a ten days' run into Dakota and 
Iowa at about this season last year. 

The old story is often yet a stern reality 
about parties inscribing on their canvas-covered 
wagon on the tramp for Dakota, "Dakota or Bust^^ 
and coming back with "Dakota" heavily marked 
out and "Busted, by Gum!" inserted in its place. 
But it hardly applied to us in the early fall of '82, 
when we two gentlemen of leisure made a trip into 
a tract roughly estimated at four hundred by four 
hundred miles square, now before Congress as a 
candidate for admission as a State. We had seen an 
exhibition of Dakota's products, natural and culti- 
vated, funny rocks and bowlders, geodes and crystals 
from the "Bad Lands," and its stupendously large, 
nay overgrown, squashes, roots, grains, and weeds. 
These were kinds of things that could not be man- 
ufactured like wooden hams and nutmegs from the 
land of inventions and humbuggery, aesthetic cul- 
ture and some pure cussedness. Neither could they 
well be duplicated this side of California or the 
Gulf States. 

But it is better to see, for one's self, even if only 
representative portions of the enormous territory 
could be visited. 



I04 SIX SEASONS ON OUK PRAIRIES. 

"Would a little trip of five hundred miles suffice, 
and that in a circle around the contiguous corners of 
Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Dakota!" Hardly — 
maybe! We would go into the country of "magnifi- 
cent distances" indeed: for five hundred miles can 
be covered here by putting down the point of your 
finger into the intersection of the four States on the, 
ordinary map. 

It is August and all is in freshest bloom. From 
Heron Lake, Minnesota, to Flandreau, Dakota, was 
all old stamping ground; and we could find few 
accessions to our wonted observations. 

Flandreau, Dakota. 

Flandreau, a prairie town of some pretensions, is 
named after an old French settler, and a Catholic, 
no doubt, who drove a stake and threw up a tent 
here some two decades or more past. It was then 
the land of the Dakota Indian, and a man's scalp 
wasn't worth hardly as much as a good powdered 
wig — until the scalp could be dressed. The Pipe- 
stone Reservation is not far off' now, and a curious 
body may run over and witness a cheap savage pa- 
geant of a war dance, some Indian drunkenness and 
slovenliness, a little sharp-shooting, and mayhap 
an old-time arrow shot, for a few dimes' admittance. 
Sometimes, tho', they advertise to show, and do 
not follow up the programme. So all one gets for 
his trouble is the sight of some ragged old tents 
propped on a rough, pyramidal-shaped frame of 
poles, a set of squaws, squatting about making bas- 
kets and canoes of birch wood for trinkets to sell; a 
lounging brave or two, much the worse for wear, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. IO5 

and with nothing remarkable about them except the 
way they wear their new-fangled, civilized suits, 
and the way they do not wear their hats on their 
unkempt poles. A few half-breed children, a bright- 
eyed Indian lad or lass rolling lazily about and talk- 
ing baby-talk, fills the picture — if you throw in a 
wrinkeled old squaw, a battered, blinking, blear- 
eyed, aged horse thief; and take in the whole culi- 
nary department, by adding some strings of jerked 
meat, a few pounds of bacon, and a hodge-podge 
pot simmering over a fire on a pole crossed on forked 
stakes. 

But we came to see white people; and to say that 
we saw crowds of them in every town of any size 
down the road and valley of the Sioux River to 
Yankton, would scarcely express the very truth. 
People? Why you might go into some thoroughfares 
of New York and New Orleans and you would not 
meet with more persons in a given time than in 
Sioux Falls, Sioux City and Yankton. Fairs were 
going on all along the line, and all the world was 
abroad; and all the hotels, hostelries and boarding 
houses so full you did well to secure a camp bed in 
the "oflSce" or waiting room. 

About Flandreau are the wide, slightly rolling 
prairies, yet full of game at a reasonable distance, 
and fragrant with wild flowers. We visited no par- 
ticular farms; but one can easily take for granted 
that anybody with the least Western "get up" about 
him can raise what he pleases in this grand, sandy 
loam, except, perhaps for a while, fruits like pears 
or peaches. It is almost useless to repeat that all 
the Western prairies, outside of strangely rock- 



Io6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

dotted portions and surprising Dalles about unex- 
pected river torrents, are all of about the same 
identical formation as to quality and, no doubt, 
also as to chemical combinations of earth. 



Sioux Valley. 

Descending South until you touch the Sioux River, 
you come into one of the simply most charming 
w^ooded and w^atered stretches of rolling prairie. 
The modest Sioux increases in w^idth and volume as 
you go dow^n, and its banks are profusely fringed 
w^ith goodly timber ; in places, thick shrubbery. 
Towns, great and small, succeed one another as 
rapidly as one w^ould imagine they must in this 
favored valley. "Picturesque as the valley of the 
Mohav^k," w^ould be the natural expression of a 
comparer, minus the more cultivated state of the soil 
and the frequency of v^^ell-ordered farm establish- 
ments of the famous Central New^ York vale. But 
the fine Sioux meanders just like its counterpart; the 
railroad follows its banks as closely ; bursts of 
glorious landscape of land and water delight as 
frequently, and with more wild freshness and un- 
touchedness. The glint of the- sun on wave and leaf 
is purer, the air lighter and sweeter, the sky lim- 
pid. Oh ! for more inhabitants for these glorious 
sites for homes away from cities, "confusion worse 
confounded"; for Catholic spires and school bel- 
fries to rear amid these shades of peace; sweet-faced 
nuns to pace and bright-eyed youth to romp in 
these natural avenues; and the beaming face of a 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. IO7 

happy priest to foster all God's work for soul and 
earth! But she is coming, Holy Religion, and 
taking up her seat in spots wide apart, collecting 
her scattered children, and not forgetting the build- 
ing of their happy homes on earth, while she turns 
the gaze and inner heart to the everlasting abodes. 
The church at Flandreau we found on the sub- 
urbs, just only closed in and made serviceable for 
summer use; no altar but a rude frame, no plaster 
nor laths, benches of rough boards. It will make a 
handsome structure when finished, and the high- 
ceilinged interior with semi-circular apse for the 
sanctuary, and outside a tolerable belfry, combine to 
promise a good-looking church. 

Sioux Falls 

is a much more pretentious and more beautifully 
sited town or young city than its northern neigh- 
bor. It is a young queen of the hills, as you 
would call its more than usually high-rolling streets 
and environs. Its streets are well laid out, and 
green with lines of maples, cottonwoods and harder 
trees. Buildings and stores are tasty and some 
even elegant. Church spires crown well-planned 
and executed houses of worship, especially of the 
Protestant denominations. The sweet Sioux rolls 
past and thro' in a somewhat rougher bed and 
between high banks, refreshing, re-greening and 
enlivening earth and gladding man and beast. 

A fair was going on, and we must not miss the 
opportunity to see the animals and products which 
the country could show. It was its first fiiir, and 
the ground was situated in a luxuriant corn field 



I08 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

with many of the stalks standing. The ring indeed 
was not much of a novelty and the animal exhibit 
was small. One notices the paucity of horses and 
draught animals out West, and wonders why some 
less western and southcrji States, which raise horses 
and mules in such abundance, do not furnish men 
with brains and capital to make a great trade in this 
line, and thus be a source of mutual benefit to both 
sides of the valley of the Mississippi. Vegetables 
and ground products, however, were plentiful, and 
showed prolific soil and some care of culture. 

On down the line of railroad we passed into more 
and more beautiful regions, some of whose inhab- 
itants have had the sensible poetry to name after 
the primeval garden they must resemble. We are 
not astonished to hail a representative Paradise and 
an Eden. Little Eden ! how beautiful in name 
and truth. It is however of^' the line of Dakota and 
just over the borders of Iowa. 

Ha! but we had our own private chuckle at the 
grave conductor, who got us ofl^ our track in his 
comfortable enough freight caboose and took us a 
pleasant jaunt over the borders and back for — ^just 
nothing. 

"Lookee, here, I want fare for this trip!" 

"Very likely," we returned; "but you won't get 
it. We bargained to go on in Dakota and you have 
lugged us off into Iowa, and you may quietly get us 
back on our route." 

"Yes, but you've got to pay for it." 

"Not a red, my uniformless official. " 

And he, after seeing he was caught, took the 
matter with good enough grace and rolled us on to 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. IO9 

the land of promise, Eden. We had some adven- 
ture there; a big hunt before dark that day and some 
chickens of our own kiUing for supper, late enough 
to make us render justice to our appetite and the 
cook's art. 

We met some strolling blind fiddlers in the little 
beautiful burg, and helped them by gratifying our- 
selves with really charming music. They were 
sharp enough to get their audience in for a gratis 
concert and not let them out without a handsome 
contribution. 

Next morning, another hunt and long, long ride 
in the fresh of the day, the grasses all dank and 
glistening with dew; the slight misty haziness but 
glorifying the atmosphere; chickens "flushing" up 
out of the meadow lands and snipe from the low 
lands. 

These are but sample towns and townlets along 
both sides of the Sioux River as it wends its gener- 
ally straight course directly south towards the great 
Jim River and the mightier Missouri. As intima- 
ted, all this region is well timbered — along the banks 
of streams peculiarly. As however you approach 
the junction of the three great rivers between Sioux 
City, Iowa, and Yankton (the now disputed capital 
of Dakota), the lands become lower, show signs of 
periodical deluges and are more specially adapted 
for grand meadows of prairie grass, where millions 
of tons of hay stand stacked, like dotting wigwams, 
as far as the eye can reach in every direction. 

Yankton, 

a usual passing point for emigrants and supplies for 
all the interior from the South, is too well known 



IIO SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRlES. 

for special description or more than transitory refer- 
ence. Its site is more diversified with rise and fall 
in levels than the surrounding country. It has a 
small stream or two running thro' its suburbs and 
unusually copious fountains of water, some miner- 
ally impregnated. 

The late seat of the vicariate of Dakota, removed 
in January, 18S4, to the more central Jamestown, 
ruled by the famous and laborious Benedictine, Rt. 
Rev. Dr. Martin Marty, Yankton is better supphed 
with churches and schools than any point west to 
the Rockies, tho' this is not saying much, as there 
are not four other large towns. It is well known 
that the former abbot of St. Meinrad's in Indiana 
has literally made all the churches and establish- 
ments of the immense territory, which now circum- 
scribes the Vicariate. The establishment of Bishop 
Brondel in wide Montana, has only divided the im- 
mense former Vicariate of Nebraska. Going and 
coming for years among whites and Indians, the 
monastic Bishop Marty has been wearing his life 
away for the life and weal of his fellowman; and he 
is still in vigor to prosecute his work. The academy 
established formerly at Yankton had to be discon- 
tinued, and only day schools furnish education for 
the growing Catholic community of whites — the 
Indians having a few government-supported and 
industrial schools. 

Northern Iowa. 
On our return to Sioux City, we were astounded 
to find such a wide-awake and stirring place, away 
from what many would call the currents of cam- 



Six weeks in our Rockies. hi 

merce. Streets crowded, hotels full, brisk business 
and cosmopolitan population, are outlines that faintly 
describe this, but a few years ago, border town. 

Then we hurried on thro' the great hay-making 
portions of Iowa. The more northern counties are 
beautiful gardens and farms, raising corn and grain in 
rivalry of the compeer State just over the Mississippi. 
Such miles and scores of miles of haying fields: 
such illimitable reaches of maize, surrounding rich 
farmers' residences and pouring gold into the lap of 
of the State! This northwestern half of Iowa, with 
all its wealth of rich prairie, is not so thickly settled, 
nor perhaps so adapted to general farming and pro- 
digious corn raising as the corresponding eastern 
half. Along the Mississippi we have noted the 
models of thrifty towns and growing cities engaged 
in milling, and specially in the great lumber trade, 
situated as they are on the main artery of some of 
the most extensive pineries of the continent. But 
back of these roll contmuous hundreds, thousands, 
of square miles of the choice prairies, adapted to 
anything in the growing line according to their 
latitude. 

It is plain, however, that corn is the staple, and far 
outstrips in quantity, luxuriance and profit, any other 
grain. Man never put his eyes on finer fields than 
those lining the almost entire route from Albert Lea 
in Minnesota, in a southeasterly course, to the cross- 
ing of the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois. No 
one need be told this whole region is long ago 
"taken up," and is not being relinquished for what is 
esteemed better, like corresponding Northern and 
Middle Illinois. 



Prairies AND Plainson to the Rockies, 




Sioux City, Iowa, Monday, July 30, 1883. 
FEW of our religious, and our Cuban, Marie, 
•formed my company on setting out at 11.30 
^P. M. from Heron Lake, Minn., to Lincoln, 
Nebraska. We were treated to the best, tho' 
weak, manifestation we had yet enjoyed of 
the Northern Lights, on the route from Avoca 
to the junction at Heron Lake. It consisted of, at 
first, a glow of whitish light arching low on the 
horizon, and now and then expanding by division 
into long rays like departing twilight, all pointing 
up very similar to one's fingers outstretched apart. 
The diminishing points reached nearly half way to 
the zenith. But all was so p^le, we agreed in call- 
ing it the "ghost of the Aurora." 

The lands in the valley of the Missouri on the 
Iowa side from below Sioux City to Omaha are 
nearly flat, as if used to being overflowed. Swampy 
places occur now and then. About half the corn 
is large and tasseled; the other half low, and a num- 
ber of fields are neglected and turned out to weeds 
and grass. Barley and rye are being harvested. The 
reserve banks of the river — provided by nature 
against the great overflows — stand far out from the 
actual w^ater course, leaving long and wide meadow 
lands of great value for grazing and hay. 

Council Bluffs and Omaha. 
Tuesday. — Very slow officials and little accom- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. II3 

modations for strangers seem the order of the day 
at Council Bluffs — quite a miserable-looking, muddy 
place. We got trapped for an hour's delay, but 
the railroad-run hotel, which makes it a business 
to force custom by retarding passengers, got none of 
our cash — plenty of round abuse, in lieu. It seems 
the railroad companies run the dummy connection 
between the two towns, and either care nothing for, 
or purposely work against, travelers catching trains 
on the opposite side of the river. It was, at least, 
our experience both times we passed by the twin 
cities here. The banks of the Missouri, the water, 
and all its surroundings, impressed us as ugly and 
unhealthy-looking. Large round iron pillars sup- 
port the singular bridge, trestled off to a considera- 
ble distance on either of the low sand banks. There 
is no provision for communication other than b}' 
rail. Back of Omaha, and in the corporation, is 
quite rolling prairie, very w^orrisome to teamsters 
inside the city limits, but that more picturesque. 
The Catholic institutions are perched around on 
commanding eminences — a similar spot being re- 
served for the new cathedral when it shall be built. 
Tho' this be all prairie land for hundreds of miles, 
we found a rock quarry on the route to Lincoln. 
There are doubtless others. The environs of Omaha 
and all along the sloping hills of the wide, shallow 
Platte River in the direction of Lincoln are well 
wooded. Corn is tasseled, but a good portion we 
see is low and uncultivated — a few fields of bar- 
ley being cut. 

There is a curious salt river in the neighborhood 
of L'ncoln, along which the vegetation is stunted 



114 ^^^ SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

or killed out. But freaks of nature increase upon 
you as you advance into our wondrous Rockies — 
the home of the grand and the awful, as of the weird 
and novel. 

Items General on Prairie Lands. 

Mr. E. V. Smalley, author of "Travels" and of the 
"History of the North Pacific Railroad," in the 
"Century" of February, 1883, writes that to the west 
of the Missouri and in Yellowstone Park the soil 
"abounds in lignite deposits; tho' the whole region 
between the Minnesota prairies (and on the same 
line south) and the Rocky Mountains is (now) 
bare of timber. The strips . . . along water courses 
in Dakota . . . consist mainly of cottonwood, soft 
maple and alder — of no value as building material. 
West of the Missouri there is . . . nothing w^orth 
sawing ... as far as the advanced spurs of the 
Rockies, and ... on to the Yellow Mountains. In 
the gorges there is sufficient bull pine and spruce for 
ties and bridge timbers. ... It is a mistake (to think) 
. . . that the rigorous Minnesota winter climate con- 
tinues ... all the way to the Rocky Mountains. 
Dakota winters are even more severe . . . because 
there are no forests to break the force of the bliz- 
zards. West of the Missouri the mean winter tem- 
perature steadily increases . . . and in December, 
January and February, in the valley of the Yellow- 
stone, it is not ruder than in Maryland or Southern 
Ohio." 

The Union and Northern Pacific Routes. 

"The snow fall is much less than in the belt of 
country along the Union Pacific R. R. . . . There is 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. II5 

no serious obstacle to regular winter traffic between 
Lake Superior and Puget Sound!" 

One would be inclined to criticise these two last 
assertions, as the partial statement of a paid agent of 
the Northern Pacific R. R. The late collapse of the 
work on the Canadian Pacific, on account of finding 
no passable mountain gap in the route, may be taken 
as a fair warning by the North Pacific, which is not 
so far south of its parallel neighbor. 

Rev. S. Byrne, writes : "The Northern Pacific 
crosses the Territory from East to West. It follows 
the Yellowstone River for about three hundred 
miles, then turns North, and after having crossed a 
range of mountains, soon enters into the valley of 
the Missouri. It then makes its way to Helena, and 
a few miles beyond that city begins to cross the 
Rocky Mountains. It is impossible fully to describe 
their wonderful work in a brief space, and the reader 
of these lines is referred to other recent works on 
the subject. There are eight hundred and forty-eight 
miles of their road in Montana, and branch lines are 
already commenced. The branch leading to the 
Yellowstone Park will be finished in a year or less. 
Besides the Northern Pacific, a branch of the Union 
Pacific Railroad has been in course of operation two 
years, from Ogden, in Utah Territory, into Montana. 
Its great utility is widely felt; and it will be a salu- 
tary stay upon the first-named road in the matter of 
regulating freight and passenger rates." 

"That Montana," continues Smalley, "formed the 
great buflalo range and is fast becoming a vast 
cattle range, verifies the assertions regarding light 
snowfalls . . . ," which often melt, I have learned 



Il6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

from another source, on short notice. North of 
Benton, in a large valley, the snow is melted by a 
periodical warm wind, and in another locality in 
Wyoming the railroad was blocked by herds of ante- 
lopes frequenting such a spot This may be the 
case elsewhere. Again says Smalley: "The forty - 
fifth parallel is the proposed line of division of North 
and South Dakota. . . . Montana is larger than 
Dakota but contains less farming land ; and, save in 
a few valleys, will not support a dense population. 
East Montana is mainly grazing; the west, a mass of 
mountain ridges, between which are narrow fertile 
valleys, where agriculture may be made profitable, 
but cannot be carried on except by irrigation. . . ." 
Again I quote Fr. Byrne: "Another and perhaps 
a clearer description is as follows : This territory, in 
its physical conformation, is naturally divided into 
four sections. First, the northwestern section lying 
between the Rocky and Bitter Root Mountains, 
which is very rugged and broken, and intersected by 
many mountain spurs. Secondly, the northern dis- 
trict, extending three hundred and fifty miles along 
the Missouri and Milk Rivers, is a vast, open plain, 
almost destitute of trees, and descending towards the 
East at the rate of five feet to the mile. Thirdly, 
the southeastern section, bordering on Dakota on 
the east and Wyoming on the south, is more rolling 
and better wooded. Fourthly, the southwestern 
section, containing fifteen thousand square miles, is 
very similar to its neighboring district of the North- 
west where we began, that is to say, very mountain- 
ous and covered with dense forests. Several moun- 
tain peaks attain a height of over ten thousand feet." 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 11/ 

That irrigation is going to be undertaken and pur- 
sued to some practical advantage by the General 
Government on a vast scale, all along the rainless 
regions leading up to the mountains, is confirmed by 
the fact that a number of artesian wells are already 
bored. Mr. John Fitzgerald, of Lincoln, Nebraska, 
a public-spirited gentleman in every sphere of busi- 
ness and enterprise, especially in carrying out railroad 
plans in the West, asserted to me that it was under- 
stood the Federal authorities would further the 
interests of the West by subsidies reaching still 
more generally among already established communi- 
ties, in the matter of water supply. 



Lincoln, Nebraska. 
To descend now from these generalities to partic- 
ulars of our special journey thro' Eastern Nebraska, 
the name of the princely railroad contractor and 
banker, Mr. Jno. Fitzgerald, would suggest some 
attempted description of Lincoln and the flower of 
the settled communities in the charming southeast- 
ern portion of the State. The subject is very tempt- 
ing to the delighted visitor; for than the city of 
Lincoln one can meet no finer city or more faultless 
surroundings in a long trip West. New as all 
things are new in this region, Lincoln is so situated 
on a slightly rolling and wooded prairie, that its 
streets are just enough varied by gentle rises and falls 
to cause no hardship to driving, and to be brought, 
withal, from the monotony of a dead level. Its 
buildings and business houses are not the blank, bare 
walls you see in similar centers of brisk trade; and 



Il8 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

the suburbs contain some of the kinghest residences, 
with grand yards and drives, boi^dered and diversi- 
fied with shrubbery, plats of grass and beds of 
flowers. The genial climate is favorable to all 
growths from the daisy to the sturdy oak. Nearly 
on the utmost boundaries of the corporation is situ- 
ated the 

New Convent 

of the Nuns of the Holy Child Jesus, under the 
prudent management of the first Superioress, Mother 
Agatha. The commodious and well-arranged three 
or four story building had been put up at great 
expense by a corporation to serve as a succursal 
establishment to a public institution of study; and 
required but the fewest changes to make it subserv- 
ient to its present and future purpose as a first-class 
day, and finally as a boarding, school. Every one 
knows about the Catholic West, who it was that, 
under the Rt. Rev. Dr. O'Connor, was the chief 
agent in securing this fine house aiid property for 
the deserving community, now making such suc- 
cessful headway in establishing its peculiarly well- 
ordered schools. It is no secret either that the same 
great' hearted gentleman has used his deserved 
wealth in settling the community and constituting 
himself the first prop of this establishment. Need- 
less to say, the good Nuns have so many scholars 
they can receive no more. 



A big blackberry crop is coming on, for which 
low lands are peculiarly adapted: and as for fruit, 
Nebraska boasts of having produced the premium 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. II9 

apples at the Exposition of 1876, I should think this 
somewhat confined to the eastern third or at most 
half of the State — some five hundred miles long. 



Thursday^ Aug. 3^. — On the road from Hastings 
to Wyoming Territory. Here is Dorchester — five 
hundred inhabitants, five bins for corn, an elevator 
and two brick stores, which I could see from the 
train. Crops of oats in the vicinity are good, some 
fine — six or eight armsful of sheaves every eight or 
ten yards. Barley is splendidly luxuriant ; wheat 
only fair and but small lots. Corn stands tolerable, 
medium height — some pretty low. 

Friendville — eight or nine hundred inhabitants, 
with dozens of railroad corn bins and an elevator 
for grain. The prairie here is level, about like on 
the line from Watseca to Chatsworth, Illinois, tho' 
not so flat or inclining to a swampy character. The 
grass we see cut with oats is neither good in quality 
nor stands well. 

Exeter — a scattered village. There are no cuts 
along the railroad, tho' some snow fences. 

Sutton, coming next, is on rolling prairie and has 
considerable cuts. 

Harvard — fairly undulating town of some size. 
About are fields of drilled corn, and we come across 
a sod house or two. 

This official report of the Rev. J. M. Smythe, 
pastor of the 

Catholic Colony, Greeley County, Neb., 

is incorporated in Mr. Wm. J. Onahan's third annual 
report, 1882: "The original tract of the Association 



I20 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

was twenty-seven thousand acres, was purchased hi 
1S77 from the Burhngton and Missouri Raih'oad 
Company in Nebraska, and is north of the Platte 
River, about one hundred and twenty-five miles 
directly west of Omaha. The colony is divided into 
two districts, named respectively after Bishops 
Spalding and O'Connor. The population now em- 
braces one hundred and seventy-five families, nearly 
all Irish, although France, England, Belgium, and 
even New Zealand, are represented. The first colo- 
nists had hardly money enough to buy oxen, but 
now they are well-to-do. The character of the 
country is rolling prairie, with uplands, valleys, and 
table lands; and the soil, which is a rich, dark loam, 
has an average depth of from three to tw^elve feet, 
though vegetables have been raised in soil taken out 
of wells at a depth of eighty feet. The soil w^ill 
never need manure, as by sub-soiling it will renew 
itself The colony is twenty miles from a railway, 
although the Union Pacific has a line to the Black 
Hills surveyed through it, wdiich will likely be built 
this summer, giving an eastern and western outlet. 
Although without a railroad, the people get higher 
prices for their corn than are paid in the railroad 
towns, as it is said to supply the stock ranches to 
the west. The stock men, instead of driving their 
cattle to middle or eastern Nebraska, can now fatten 
them on the ranch, and ship them direct. Greeley 
county is known as the banner potato county of 
Nebraska. One colonist realized $1,000 oft' of three 
acres last season, and three others planted one acre 
each, and each yielded three hundred and ninety-five 
bushels. The Association has only two thousand 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 121 

acres unsold, which it offers to colonists on eight 
years' time at 6 per cent. Parties who have been 
renting farms at $5 per acre, have paid $2.50 for 
farms in the colony and raised better crops. The 
colony is situated between two rivers, so that if there 
is any rainfall in the vicinity it is benefited by it. It 
has a natural drainage, and there being no stagnant 
water, there is no malaria. There are no long 
winters, and the summers are not hot, the nights in 
the latter season being cool and delightful. There 
has never been a case of sunstroke in that country. 
The climate is phenomenally healthful, and the 
people hardly know what sickness is." 

The region of this Catholic colony is described as 
fertile as the best, and is considered by the coloniza- 
tion officials as the flower lands of all they control 
from Minnesota to Texas. Parties within easy reach 
of them, and disinterested as far as any connection 
with the sale or occupation of them is concerned, 
give me very favorable reports of the contentedness 
of the colonists; adding that they have never had a 
failure in their past seasons, and their crops this 
year are rather above the average. The land is 
cheap and given on easy terms. 

In one-half mile from Grand Island, the station 
whence the visitor takes the railroad North for 
twenty-five miles to reach the stage connecting with 
the colonies — poor farming land sells for $1.25 per 
acre; and in four or five miles from the city, $8 to 
$20 per acre. The Catholic congregation here and 
in the neighbood numbers some eighty-five families, 
while the colony now counts two hundred. Taking 
Nebraska as a whole Fr. Byrne, O. P., gives the fol- 



132 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

lowing Items of interest: ''During a period of five 
years the average yield of crops per acre was as fol- 
lows: Wheat, eighteen bushels; corn, thirty-five; 
rye, twenty-five; oats, thirty seven; potatoes, eighty. 
Nebraska wheat usually brings the highest price in 
the St. Louis market. Cottonwood, oak, soft maple, 
elm and black walnut are indigenous to the soil and 
are found chiefly along the water courses. It is in 
the southwestern counties we find the best supply." 

Bayard Taylor, the great American tourist and 
scholar, describing this country, writes as follows: 
"This is one of the most beautiful countries I ever 
looked upon. There is in it none of that weary 
monotony that you find in the prairies of Illinois or 
in the swamps of Ohio or Indiana. The wide, bil- 
lowy green, dotted all over with golden islands of 
harvest — the hollows of dark, glittering maize — the 
park-like clumps of timber along the course of 
streams, these were materials which went to the 
making up of every landscape; and the eye never 
wearies of their sweet, harmonious, pastoral beauty." 

Bayard, the tourist, recalls the funnily illustrated 
book of A. C. Wheeler— "Nym Crinkle" of the 
"New York World" — on a tour on the "Iron Trail," 
thro' the next lower line of railroad by way of Kan- 
sas to the Rockies. He gives an illustration of the 
flat, limitless, buffalo-roamed plains, only you must 
substitute commoner cattle for the wild bison, now, 
like his human counterpart, the red man, moving in- 
definitely west and nearly extinct. An old time 
railroad station indicator, a great clothing store sign 
with an awful hand and "one mile to t're (sic!) Rail- 
road Station Food and Water," painted with a house 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I33 

brush all over it; next, "Lots for Sale," stuck on a 
slanted stake and surrounded by skulls and ribs, big- 
eyed owls, and present and perspective prairie 
dogs — underscored "First Farm-site Speculators!;" 
a house-roof covered with hides in lieu of boards or 
shingles — the body buried; "ship of the plains at 
sea," viz: long lines of ancient house-like wagons 
pulled by a dozen oxen or mules; "ship of the plains 
in dock" — our prairie schooners backed up to the 
curbs of big-as-all-outdoors warehouses and being 
packed by "Greasers" and land-lubbers of the cow- 
boy persuasion, such as you see yet frequently in 
Cheyenne, Denver and in their neighbors of the 
foothills; a single braced-bed wagon, ornamented 
by a clothes-line string of jerked beef or rather 
bison, and enlivened by the proximity of two of the 
proprietors cooking their meal over a camp-lire — 
mules grazing in reach : and we have something of 
Nym's sketches on the plains of Kansas, which will 
fit any of the plains. 




Six Weeks in our Rockies: 

A DIARY. 



Diary of Six Weeks in our Rockies. 




Grand Island, Neb., Friday, Aug. 4, 18S3. 
iN spite of pre-arrangements by telegraph for 
ja sleeper at Grand Island, I found nobody up 
mi the sleeping car, and had to help myself to 
some slipless pillows and stretch out on the 
seats. Maxwell, the first place we strike in 
the morning, is a primitive settlement w^ith 
half a dozen dingy frames. But soon after we pass 
it we encounter some nine hundred or one thousand 
sheep pasturing along the River Platte — which we 
are following three hundred and fifty mijes. The 
soil is very sandy and level. No farms or houses 
are to be seen, but a few "bunches" of cattle and 
more sheep in the space between us and the inter- 
minable low ranges of mound-like hills on either 
hand. We encounter, too, some handsome trees and 
shrubs. Again, hardly any dwellings except a spare 
sod hut, intended for rangers and cowboys. It has 
been raining ever since we left Grand Island at 2.30 
A. M. The inhabitants say Providence is sending 
rain as the boundaries of civilization advance; and 
aver they have hopes they shall lose no great time 
irrigating, after a number of years, as the rainfall 
will then sufiice. 

Breakfast we get late at North Platte, two hun- 
dred and ninety-one miles from Omaha, and two 
thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine feet already 



138 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

above sea level, with two thousand inhabitants; and 
some ten thousand cattle and sheep in sight. lo A. 
M., we arrive at the village of Alkali, so called, an 
old ranger told me, on account of the much impreg- 
nated nature of the soil, whose surface water, thirty 
years ago, killed numerous animals and a few men 
who drank it. Artesian wells are already in requi- 
sition. 

Ogallala signs : "General Store" — "Clothing at 
Cost" — "Saloon"— "O. K. Saloon" — "Post Office 
and Bakery" — "Rest for the Cow-Boys." 

The Platte here is a shallow pond of scattered sand 
islands. On the flats feed three hundred or four 
hundred horses and ponies; twelve hundred or fif- 
teen hundred cattle on the opposite side. Again, 
thousands; then forty or fifty. Cattle are shipped 
from along here for $5 per head to Chicago (twenty 
to a car) and average $40. 

Sydney : four thousand and six feet high — good 
dinner of fish and vegetables. This country is some- 
what bluffy, and scattered table rocks abound. 
Hills are becoming more decided; on them a few 
spruces are appearing. Some houses of railroad ties 
dot the bare plains, built much like our old Ken- 
tucky stockades, only with sod roofs. Cattle pens, 
or corrals, are made of the same, and old ties are 
used also for firewood. Those thrown along the 
track seem to have rotted easily — from the alkali, I 
suppose, as it would hardly be natural for native 
pine, spruce or hemlock to decay so rapidly of itself. 
Fifty-two miles from Cheyenne. 

Pine Bluft's, from natural features so called, are a 
semi-circular range of rocky, wooded hills, rounding 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I29 

off beautifully to the left. The trees are, or look to 
be, stunted. To the right, the plain sweeps past a 
jut of headland. A storm mutters over it sullenly. 
Grass has been growing shorter, soil sandier. We 
pass a hut of logs with shingle front and a log and 
dirt stable. Signs: "I's Place" — "Saloon" — "Halo 
ther" — "Dry Goods and Groceries." Here are stable 
and plank stockades of slabs — also used extensively 
for out-houses in the mountains. Here we meet 
bluffs of crumbling rocks, pools of rain-water at 
their feet. The six hundred-mile plain stretches on 
ever the same. 

Fifteen miles from Cheyenne. Tho' the grass is 
very thin and suitable for sheep-grazing, we see at- 
tempts to cut and cock it for hay. The hill ranges 
for scores of miles have been soft and undulating, 
with exceptions above. A few rocks and gravel 
are the sole next feature. 

Cheyenne, Capital of Wyoming, 

sprang up the "Magic City of the Plains" in '67 with 
the advent of the Union Pacific Railroad. Catholics 
set up in '68, with a $9,000 church, of which Rev. T. 
J. Nugent is the present pastor. The city is just 
midway between Ogden and Omaha, five hundred 
and fifteen miles from each. Water is obtained 
from lake "Mahpalutah," three-quarters by three- 
eighths of a mile in extent. But ten or twelve 
inches of rain fall here during the year, I was in- 
formed by the Government meteorologist, a cour- 
teous Catholic gentleman. But few trees diversify 
the streets or yards and they decay soon. Grass and 
greenery are precious and cherished as jewels. The 



I'^O SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIKIES. 

plains in the neighborhood are illimitable, except to- 
wards the Rockies, and are thus very favorable for 
building. They produce little more than sparse 
blades of grass and a fevs^ weeds, and are very grav- 
elly. Scattered wild blossoms sweeten the wild. 
The spurs of the southern Black Hills rear in the 
Northwest; and Long's Peak, one of the highest in 
the main range, looms up grandly at a distance of 
seventy -five miles. The range shows clefts in the 
sunshine thirty miles away, and appears but twenty- 
eight or thirty yards against the sky. This town of 
five thousand inhabitants is already six thousand and 
forty-two feet above sea level; the air is cool and 
bracing in the dog days — even cold, now in August. 
The country is blessed with sunshine nearly the year 
round, even in dead of winter. As little rain, so 
little snow, falls here; but the w^inds are described 
as awful, when they sweep unobstructed down the 
even plain, hedged by the mountains on but one 
side. 

August \th, II A. M. — I start to Denver. At 
Carr the hills are rolling; ruins, as of ground founda- 
tions, dot the hollows, and the prospect of the roll 
and tumble of the hills to the Rockies reminds me 
of the storm-heaving sea. The midchain on the 
back-ground walls up the horizon by its huge bulk 
peaked with summits of snow; and like the magnifi- 
cent dome of Nature's temple. Long's Peak towers 
majestic over all. 

Eaton, Greeley, Evans — we leap suddenly from 
a sandy, volcanicly sterile region into cultivated 
farming oases, colored with great fields of fair 
wheat, half-sized potatoes and corn. Harvest of 



Six weeks in our rockies. 131 

barley is going on. Evans is a bloom in the desert; 
fine trees towering up over the pretty prairie blos- 
soms of yellow and purple, red and white ; corn 
fields, drilled and sown broadcast, wave green; and 
all this is created by artificial irrigation from the 
river (the South Platte), which flows crooked and 
well-wooded along the base of the foot hills on to 
Denver. If, on gazing at the bald-headed, snow- 
peaked Rockies, one exclaims in praise to the Cre- 
ator: "Thou, indeed, art Almighty God;" as he turns 
to the feats of little man in these newly-populated 
regions — vegetation produced from gravel and sand 
dunes and ant hills — cactus, like great green prickly 
human tongues, and sage not half concealing the 
arid ground — he is forced to add : " Oh, powerful 
man! thine image and likeness is indeed of the Cre- 
ator, and His work shines brightest in thee, head of 
Nature." Here's another plain mountain townlet. 
Canvas-roof house, then a brick; a saloon with great 
canvas sign, "Railroad Crossing;" a tent; "Saloon 
and lunch room;" good brick and sizable frame — 
and you have the photograph, instantaneous and 
perfect. 

To Central City. 

A storm of mist and rain just past as we push 
into the mouth of the mountains, now spanned by a 
glorious rainbow. The spurs rise, mottled, pillar- 
headed, on either hand. All the torrent-watered 
valley smiles with greenery of wild shrubs of Cot- 
tonwood, alder and willow. Little two-foot corn, 
whitish hay and greenish oats, some cut, dotted 
alonof. 



132 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Golden, a city shining with green vegetation, has 
fine buildings, in a rocking vale up and dow^n the 
sides of the hemlock-flanked spurs. This is a tough 
climb for the grimy and griming little narrow- 
gauge up Clear Creek Canon, forty miles to Central 
in four hours — some hundred feet rise to a mile in 
distance. Qiieer series of towns or scattered houses, 
rather; mines; abandoned prospect holes and "dumps" 
fly slowly past, up and down the enormous gulches. 
All nationalities are working side by side, and all 
mixed— Chinese, Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scotch; 
English and Yankees bossing the capital, Irishmen 
principally the labor. 

Items Religious and Profane on the Rockies. 

In '59, the American Desert stretched from almost 
the Missouri River to the Rockies. Flour was sold 
at the very nominal value of $50 a sack. It may 
interest to jot some items of the older history of 
these parts. 

In the clifl' houses of Rio Mancos there lived the 
supposed descendants of the Aztecs. Later the 
Mexicans ascended as far as Pueblo. Indians in- 
habited 

Colorado. 

As late as 1806 Colorado was a part of the French 
Louisiana Purchase. Jim Pursley, of Bardstown, 
Ky., was the first explorer before Pike, Long, James; 
or before even Fremont came in '43. Of the early 
history of Pueblo, Wilbur Stone says: "Game was 
plenty in early days and settlers frequently indulged 
in it during winter, both for food and pastime. It 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I33 

consisted chiefly of deer, antelopes, jack rabbits, 
monte and seven-up!" From '60 to '79, fifteen daily 
and fifty weekly papers have sprung up. The three 
thousand Ute Indians in Western Colorado have 
twelve million acres reserved for their use. 

The average of the timber line is eleven thousand 
eight hundred feet; average height of mountains 
being eleven thousand feet. An average of seventy- 
two cloudy days in the year is calculated from the 
signal service since '63. Average snow, forty days. 

From a pamphlet of '74, we learn of two hundred 
and fifty authenticated cures of asthma in this 
mountain country. Rheumatism and purely nervous 
diseases become worse, and mountain pneumonia 
prevails. 

The geologists have it that in the tertiary period 
at Denver and Golden, there was a large swamp for 
hundreds of miles north into British Columbia and 
south into New Mexico, wherein flourished a luxu- 
rious vegetation, whose decomposition has resulted 
in the largest strata of tertiary coal in the valley of 
the Missouri. 

In the Spanish part of the State there were 
churches at La Trinidad, La Costilla and Los Con- 
eyos, with some dependent chapels. 

As TO Idaho. 

the Jesuits from St. Louis received three delega- 
tions of Indians from '30 to '39, all begging for a 
priest. The Jesuits baptized six hundred of the 
Iroquois and Flatheads in six months. The first 
mission was founded in '41, and the Vicariate Apos- 
tolic included Idaho and Montana in '68. Popula- 
tion of CathoUcs in '78, 5,850 — 3,000 whites. 



134 ^^^ SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Catholic Pueblos and Missions. 

Not only can we claim that the Catholic Norse- 
men from Iceland founded churches in Greenland 
and Martha's Vineyard, just five hundred years 
before Plymouth Rock, and remained until an ice 
revolution from 60 degrees north destroyed the 
whole face of the country, but Dr. G. Shea proves 
that long prior to the Puritans there were three 
missions of religious: i. Spanish Dominicans, Fran- 
ciscans and Jesuits in the South, from Florida to 
California. 3. French Recollects and Jesuits from 
the St. Lawrence to the Pacific, and from the Gulf 
to Hudson's Bay. 3. English Jesuits in Maryland, 
of whom all but the last preceded the advent of 
any sect or minister. 

The earliest friar, Mark of Nice, came in 1539, but 
had to relinquish the field of California and New 
Mexico in 1542. The expedition of Coronado 
reached the head-waters of the Arkansas, but turned 
back to the Rio Grande in the diocese of Santa Fe — 
Father Padilla and Brother John of the Cross only 
remaining and obtaining martyrdom at Qiiivira, just 
fifty years after Columbus and forty years after the 
Franciscans had poured out their blood in New 
Mexico. Others succeeded them and "all the tribes 
on the Rio Grande," whose towns are still extant, 
"were converted." In the next century, the Apaches 
destroyed many villages. New Mexico was con- 
quered by the United States in '45 and annexed. 

In 1768 Upper California was bereft of its Jesuit 
missionaries, who were immediately succeeded by 
the Franciscans and a few seculars. There were 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I35 

twenty-two missions there up to 1822. San Diego, 
Monterey and San Francisco had seventy-five thou- 
sand converts in 1825. 

Mexico became free, and the Spanish missionaries 
being driven out, rehgion languished here and in 
Texas, which was French in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. There were martyrs in San Antonio and San 
Francisco. Rehgion has revived since the estabhsh- 
ment of the Vicariate ApostoHc in 1842. 

The Cathohc population of New Mexico is the 
largest, in proportion, of any State or Territory of 
the Union. The Catholic population west of the 
Mississippi River in 1882 was 1,461,500; the whole 
population in 1880, 11,282,000; the Catholic popula- 
tion being to the whole as one to seven, about. 

To Georgetown. 

August ()th. — Wheat is being harvested, preced- 
ing a week or so, the cutting of hay, oats and barley; 
which latter, in the mountain valleys, is generally cut 
green, in the "milk," to serve as food for animals. 
Corn is thin and low, hke the wheat, which is prin- 
cipally of spring variety, tho' I know of a field of 
oats seeding itself from the past season. Wheat has 
to suffer if not rained on before it comes up, as 
irrigation only serves for later stages of growth. 
Everything is green — vegetables fresh, young lettuce, 
peas, radishes, etc. 

The cars make but ten miles an hour up the Ca- 
non, and ease down about at the same speed. As 
the proverb says, '^Every blanket, its flea;" so every 
up-train its motes for the eye, by reason of its hard 
puffing. 



136 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Here we come to "pie-station," so called from the 
substantiality of refreshments in the shape of milk, 
coffee, sandwiches and pies, to satisfy the increased 
appetites sharpened by the rarifying air. 

Cool, cooler as we branch off to the Georgetown 
Canon, and along the plunging, dashing Clear Creek, 
which comes nearer being a reality, by the cold, 
glassy waters foaming into pearlier beads and runs. 
Up this branch there is little gulch mining and no 
defilement of the torrents — the opening being much 
broader and finer than up to Central, as the gorge 
widens on either hand into grander slopes of now 
jagged and bony, now smoother and grassy fianks. 
Nor do we meet such precipitous overhanging 
masses. "Hills peep over hills" — profiles past pro- 
files, where we see cows browsing the sweet grass 
on leveler ledges. Here is a level tract with angles 
of hills at 45 degrees; then great groves of pine trees, 
regular and beautiful — their paler spring or summer 
foliage comparing with their older needles, as pea 
with sea-green. 

These hills — hills? They are as high as the aver- 
age Alps — rise upwards of 2,500 and 3,000 feet 
above the torrent. This Georgetown and Central 
City measure respectively 8,400 and 8,510 feet, and 
you can ascend to over 14,000 feet above sea level 
in twelve miles of here, at Grey's or James' Peaks. 
So that instead of comparing these with the Alps, 
the Europeans must compare theirs with ours and 
say the "European Rockies" instead of our saying 
the "American Alps." The Alps ? The Alps aver- 
age but 10,000 feet. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 1^7 

Coleridge's poem on Mt. Blanc and the Vale of 
Chamouni has double application in Colorado: 

'•Thou . . . most awful form . . . 
Risest from forth thj silent sea of pines 
How silently. . . . Sole sovran of the vale, 
Who sank thj sunless pillars in the earth? 
Who filled thj countenance with rosy light.'' 
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams.^ 
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! 
Who called ye forth from night and utter death, 
Down these precipitous, black, jagged rocks. 
Forever shattered and the same forever! 
Ye pine groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!" 

And Chas. Mackay poetizes on such " Mountain 
Tops:" 

"The earth beneath them seemed as it had boiled, 
And tossed and heaved in some great agony; 
Like suddenly at fiat of the Lord 
The foaming waves had hardened into hills 
And mountains, multitudinous and high. 
Of jagged outline, piled and overpiled 
One o'er the other. Calmly the grey heads 
Of these earth-fathers pointed up to heaven; 
Titanic sentinels, who all the night 
Look at their kindred sentinels, the stars. 
To hear the march and tramp of distant w orlds. 
Ye hills, I love ye! Oh! ye mountain tops, 
Lifting serenely your transcendent brows 
To catch the earliest glimpses of the dawn! 
It is a pain to know ye and to feel 
That nothing can express the deep delight 
With which your beauty and magnificence 
Fill to o'erflowing the ecstatic mind!" 

Vegetation, in a chosen spot, is glorious for this 
altitude — gardens showing, farms broadening, among 
the gulches. We can not see the creek for the gross 
undergrowth, interlocked pines and spruces. Here 



138 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

are rich patches of grass and some healthy-looking 
potatoes. It is claimed the mountaineers can raise 
as fine j^otatoes as are wanted. 

The strata of rock travel up to Idaho Springs from 
below and down from above, this point being their 
meeting place. And how beautifully shine with 
mica and metallic lustre some of these superb moun- 
tain flanks! Aladdin's cave turned inside out! 

Friday — We arrive at Georgetown, of some 4,000 
inhabitants, in an arm of the mountains — a flat sand- 
level, watered by the great roaring Clear Creek, with 
its tributaries from the Silver Plume gulches. The 
city is headed oft' by a mountain front, and walled 
on either part by precijDitous half rock, half earth, 
altitudes of 2,200 feet to 3,000 feet above the town. 
The ascent up one side, to what is called Highland 
Park, is so great a climb, that it takes two hours and 
one-half of moderate travel on foot to make it; and 
w^e, who have been there, can aver that a nian only 
finds out, when too late, what a fool he was to go 
up at all, as the ascent is of the hardest and least in- 
teresting, and you have but a poor prospect when 
you have reached the top. Some snow ranges; the 
little conic, white-streaked "Professor" looming up 
in a point: Grey's peak, looking lower, tho' higher: 
the plains oft' towards Denver appearing up over the 
tops of the peaks; the silvery line of the motionless 
looking torrents down the gulches, and you have it 
all in a sentence. Then comes a plunge down of an 
hour and one-half, breaking up the muscles spared 
in the ascent! And an act of contrition with a firm 
purpose of never doing so any more — and you have 
only to groan and ache the rest of the day over your 
folly. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I39 

August loth. — We visit to-day with Fr. N. Matz, 
the pastor of the mountain city, the famous Green 
Lake, which report wants to place at 10,000 feet and 
which it scarcely reaches; as Highland makes only 
10,400 by the instrument, and the lake is near seven 
hundred feet below this. The extent of the really 
bottle-green and glass-clear lakelet, embedded be- 
tween a rough hewn tumble of rocks dressed in 
shaggy pines, and a shady, graveled shore, is three- 
quarters of a mile long, by about three-eighths of a 
mile wide. The bottom, visible for twenty-five or 
thirty feet, is a rough, rocky funnel, some seventy- 
five feet at the deepest, while the walls ascend 1,500 
to 2,300 or 2,300 feet above. You mount to the 
Lake by a zigzag route up the Clear Creek bed 
until you reach a fine forest of almost untouched 
growth. We had a row on the placid green bosom, 
reflecting the mountains and pines, and visited the 
"Battle of the Gods," an awful tumble of granite 
bowlders and stones, heaped up like a pyramid in 
ruins and copped by a wigwam-like, open cave, 
called "Cave of the Winds;" whence you descend by 
leaps to the lake edge. This is the poetic fruit of 
the visit: 

GREEN LAKE OF THE ROCKIES. 

Chaste emerald lake! 
Snow nursling, awake! 
Thou crystal, pure fountain, 
In lap of the mountain, 
Art child of the steep and the sky. 

Snow Naiads, 

Star Pleiads — 



40 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

God's angels erst courted thine eye. 
Ere earth -wrack had torn thee 
And time-fret had worn thee, 
Thou mirror of light in the hills! 
In spring rime 
Of old time, 
Thou fruitful wert mother of rills. 

Yet, creamy white daughters 
Of molten-glass waters 
Make glad by their laughing. 
As mountain wine quaffing, 
Bead-foaming they bound to the river. 
How calm thine increase. 
In rock eyrie of peace. 
Green well-spring of torrents forever! 
Thy tossed rocks 
And torn walls. 
Thy pine locks 
And foam falls 
But make thy serenity grander. 



So pray we. 

Oh! may we 
Survive the first ruins of birth, 
Reflect heaven's light upon earth; 
And in the strong hour 
Of self-possessed power — 
In earth-seeming madness 
Give waters of gladness, 
To green o'er our sadness, 
As to eternity's ocean we wander. 

A school of fat trout are nurtured and fed by hand 
near the shore; they are above ordinary size and are 
fairly spoiling for a fry. Strangers are not allowed 
to fish. There are two other basins, or hatcheries 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 14I 

for the smaller and smallest fish, in the shape of 
wood-walled and rock-bound tanks or reservoirs. 

Little frail mica shales that you grind to powder 
in your fingers, with gneiss, quartz and mineral ore, 
ibrm this mighty spinal column of the Western 
World. But all the mass seems — is, disintegrating 
and falling to ruins. They have frequent scurries of 
rain and snow in this spot. In the first days of 
August, last year, came a fall of snow, and twelve 
inches the 15th of July before, while fifteen inches 
covered Georgetown, August 29th, 1882. Snow 
falls almost every month in the year in some part of 
the mountains; still sunshine prevails six-sevenths 
of the year. 

How bright and fresh the young city in the lap 
of the mountains! The light is the white light, 
bright light of the sunny East, whose Lebanons and 
Olympuses it reflects — whose ruggeder Sharons 
and Carmels. The rough-faced flanks glow with 
reflected sun-light ; and when we add the magic 
silver and gold heart of the mountains set in brilliant 
crystals and pyrites, one is fairly in dreamland. In 
sight of this we sing: 

A SONG OF THE MOUNTAINS.^ 

Ye rock-pine ranks 

And nascent rivers, 
On mountain flanks — 
O lesson -givers! 
I would ye fire 

Earth's ruined eclipse, 
And sky-inspire 

These earth-sealed lips! 



♦Published in the "Ave Maria," September, 1S83. 



142 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAlRlfiS. 

For sin -mad few 

Have marred what God hath done; 
And nothing new 

Is now beneath the sun. 
How looketh all unto a primal state, 
And Nature, like its unthroned monarch, Man, 
Stands ghastly, oft, a ruin of itself 
So stood the ruined Archangel at his fall. 
— Were these sheer peaks not lordlier erst? 

Nor shot 
Them down below jon earth-heaped vale? 

And what 
Hath scalped these summits of their verdant locks, 
And left them open to the tempest's rage — 
Their foreheads ploughed, like Satan's, lightning-scathed? 
Were they but unclean vessels then as now. 
To hold the broken corpses of the steeps — 
By Death-sin felled, and hurled by rodent Time! 
The plain — saith Nature's seer — quiescent earth, — 
While mountain labors and dismembers self. 
As quakes its aspen, and its stately pine 
Hangs rigid arms and wrings pale hands in woe; 
Anon, the tear-stains soil the sensive rocks, 
Whose tear-drops steal adown their rugged cheeks. 
To swell the floods of wounded Nature. 

Thus, 
Its lord, created on a pinnacle. 
So little less than angels that they sought 
His converse, and sweet symphonied about 
The jasper walls of Eden. Man looked, — 
Creation crouched submissive at his feet 
To learn its name. He, ruined hierarch. 
Was stricken from his height, for pride and lust, — 
Was shiftless goaded down the steep, to fight 
His Mother Earth for suck, and ward his life 
From rebel brutes, revenging God 'gainst man. 

The mountain torrents nearest native snows. 
Unsullied, sparkling, leap and glad the heart — 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 143 

Until they touch the haunts of men. Then, fouled 
By contact, haste the murky waters on, 
Awaking mountain-echoes with their roar 
Of pain at chastity defiled. 

Pure winds. 
The breath of mountain peak and vale — sisters, 
Unsmirched as they, of glass-pure waters, sigh 
Of unflecked stars and heaven, until they soar 
About the smoking mines and hives of men. 
Thus all, befouled by sinful creature, wreaks 
Revenge on him and his who ruined all. 
— No hope ? 

Forbid it God, and Christ who died! 

The millions of fingers 
Of armies of singers 
Point up from on high — 
From their ranks in the sky ! 

Their green arms not swinging, 

Nor silvered hands wringing, 

But strong arms outflinging. 

To lift to the height. 
Their red crests aglow 
'Gainst driftings of snow. 
They hail after sunset 
— Yet gilding the runlet — 

The kindling of camp-fires, 

Ignited from cloudland; 
— 'Tis trysting of war 

Of the Pines and the Star! 

In sammets and sapphires, 

A king o'er his proud band. 

The Prince doth appear. 

With his glittering spear — 

Bright harbinger. Eve-star, 

Leads on to the sky war. 
To clamber the blue height. 
And conquer the Old Night — 
Unbending and proud, 



144 ^^-^ SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Their banner the cloud, 
The phalanx of Pines 
Storm up the inclines! 

Such, Christian, the lists 
Of the armies of Christ: 
So, e'en thro' the mists 
Of the twilight of wrath, 
Must ye seek the path 
To the mountain of tryst. 

By gluttony, pride, 

By duties denied. 

Ye fell from the right! — 

March on up the height, 

Like your brothers, the Pines, 

Unbending to winds 

And hurtling storms. 
Not angelic forms, 
But mankind have trod 
These mountains of God. 

E'er Christ-led 

And Christ-fed: 

All tearless 

And fearless, 

Storm sky-height 

By Christ- light, 

And, wavering never. 

Wear laurels forever! 



These heights are growing on me. What I took 
to be 500 or 700 feet high has shot up to three or 
four times as much and not exceeded the reahty. 
The bold headlands about here are many above 
timber line, some probably 12,000 feet high, and up- 
wards of 3,500 or 4,000 above town. Green Lake is 
1,500, and thence we can see mountain heads above 



6iX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 145 

US certainly 2,000 or more feet higher. It took 
Stanley and the astronomers of the total eclipse a 
couple of years ago, some three or four hours to 
reach such a spot from this Green Lake. There is a 
flag staft" on top of the highest, left there by the 
party of scientific climbers. 

To Silver Plume. 
August iith. — Up the gorge or open Canon, to 
the right of Georgetown. The new railroad, whose 
track is just being laid and bridges built, takes this 
wind, always rising about 200 feet per mile, in per- 
fect lines of curve, with five bridges, one seventy- 
five feet high: the line of road runs along the base 
of the great masses on the left and in front of George- 
town; crosses the creek-torrent; doubles back on 
itself over the high bridge, then ascends; crosses 
twice again, once more redoubles and finally takes a 
long sweep up. Silver Plume is 500 feet higher 
than Georgetown, situated in a little lap of the gorge, 
the sublime rocks, towering to thousands of feet on 
both sides of the silver-foam torrent, rushing past 
and around the houses, some of which are built in 
fancy styles. Oflfto the left rears the bald Elephant 
Back, 12,000 feet; to the right swings the mighty 
hill, and the great jutting rock-land rises beyond, a 
background imposing and beautified by a fringe of 
fine spruces, one of which, specially remarkable for 
its height and symmetry, forms the apex to a soli- 
tary peak of piled granite. 

Middle Park, Colorado. 
Sunday, Aug. 12th. — To Middle Park, on Frazier 
River, over Empire Pass, which our aeronoid regis- 



'l/j.6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIE^. 

ters at 8,500, to Empire, 8,400 feet. As we rise on 
the flank of the rocks the valley widens and deepens 
to the vision; the little town in Clear Creek Canon 
some couple of miles below, with its superb grove of 
native pines, puts on a picturesque air, and the 
mountain walls rise and roll in their majesty, forming 
the ascent to the high distant sky. Glorious! Wind- 
ing down over the creek at the bottom of Empire- 
town, we circle to the left and toil along a fine 
gravel road up the Canon and past the beautiful 
pine and harvest-green valley of Empire. This is 
capable of being an extended town, stretching back 
and forth thro' the higher sides of che inclining flat 
to the creek. Passing further, we come to a fine 
race-track on a good level and surrounded by pine 
groves and willow brush. Great dalles of rock close 
in the torrent; and as the pass narrows, the moun- 
tains swing ofl' more sublimely to the right and left, 
until we come to the grandest pile I saw in the 
foot-hills of the Rockies, the famous "Skull Pro- 
montory," so-called because of its peculiar repre- 
sentation of a human head-piece. In a general pro- 
file it resembles, however, a gigantic stair-case, of 
more or less regular steps, such as one might imagine 
to be the lower flight of that Godly way down 
which He, who has His tabernacle in the sun, de- 
scends with mighty leaps to earth. "He comes, 
skipping over the hills." 



Oddities among Sublimities. 
Ah! here's the "Atlantic House" — a fine good- 
lettered gold sign, on a black sanded ground, attached 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 147 

to a house — well! a big box three-fourths of a story, 
opposite a saw-dust pile. On one end a hotel: 
ahem I on the other, a bar room with a pair of deer- 
horns over the entrance. A little farther on and we 
come to a new ''camp," where extensive mills and 
boarding house are nearly completed and a town 
commenced of one-half dozen or so shanties of log 
and boards; all springing, they say, out of an inspira- 
tion of some fool spiritualist, with spare cash of his 
own (or may be somebody else's). He knew by 
mediums there was a fine prospect for a good mine 
in these rugged hills. So far it has panned out noth- 
ing — but a hole in the hills. Passing the toll-gate, 
where we pay nearly $6 toll, we strike the foot of the 
range on a superb mountain road, level and well kept. 
And we are delighted to greet an abundance of wild 
flowers: American blue-bells, heliotropes, mountain 
daisies — very aster-like — and little dew-drop lilies, 
roses en masse, and at all stages from tiny buds, to 
full-blown, deep-blushing, full dress. 

At 5.20 P. M., we reach 10,000 feet and see skip- 
ping about the old robin and the new magpie, the 
latter looking pretty rusty and bachelor-like in his 
neglige and ruffled plumage of black and white. 
Smaller chippers dot the fir boughs. Looking down 
thro' a rift in the dense forest, we see the clouds drift- 
ing in the gorges, and by the mountain sides and 
tops; while the torrent calls from 2,000 feet below, 
and the mingled scent of pine gum and snow rein- 
vigorates the uptoilers. In front is a great sharp 
backbone of the Red Elephant, the naked sides like 
fine keel. At 10,250 flowers follow scantier; and 
climbing 200 feet of a short cut of sixty degrees in- 



148 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

clination, we fall upon the reddest, red roses and 
buds sweet as can be imagined in their first blush in 
the hard world and against the rugged, time-stained 
rock faces. Whitened stems of the pines on the 
opposite mountain show Nature frozen out in the 
attempt to scale the sides, while we, ourselves, begin 
to tuck our clothes about us more closely, and add to 
them to keep out the ever more chilling air. Here 
we discover our first Indian pinks, a kind of Indian, 
fusky red, of rather coarse texture, pretty, a way oft'. 

•Berthoud Pass. 

At the top of the Pass, at 6.20 P. M., we halt to 
lunch and breathe. We are on the continental Di- 
vide; and from a swing, tied in the bough of a fir, 
we can enjoy the sensation of one minute breathing 
the air of the Atlantic, the next of the Pacific slope. 
James' Peak, oft' to the right with its snow -patched 
head, seems only a rifle shot or two away, tho' it re- 
mains that far and more for over an hour of travel 
towards it. We knock at the perfectly cruciform 
log inn at the top for a drink of coff'ee, but "the 
water has not boiled," and we drink California sherry. 
We are glad to get down out of the chilling cold — 
tho' the grass is emerald green beside the snow 
patches and potatoes flourish below — into the more 
genial latitude of 9,400 feet. 

The triple source of the Frazer leaps down across 
our path in brilliant amber waves and beady foam. 
Green meadows of great, long grasses glide swiftly 
past us; while, opposite in the setting sun-rays, the 
solid mounts of pine sweep up alongside the bur- 
nished king's becker of California gold, redly glow- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I49 

ing, and stretching above in the mountain heights to 
within a few degrees of zenith. Having taken four 
hours to labor up the Atlantic slope, we scud down 
the Pacific, twelve miles, in just 1.35 by the watch. 
Monday morning we had two Holy Masses at 

Cozen's Ranche, 
a good roomy and porched frame, capable of com- 
fortably accommodating twenty-odd besides the fam- 
ily, and on a pinch some thirty-seven or thirty- 
eight, as has been practically proven. This is situated 
below Vasquez's Creek, a branch of the Frazer, 
which agfain feeds the Grand River, and is the inevi- 
table and much-sought resort of travelers from the 
"outside" and the "inside," as the mountaineers call 
the ultramontane and cismontane regions. The enter- 
tainment is of the best — the fat of the land and of the 
water — in the shape of all the diverse wild game and 
mountain trout. Superadded fruits and even moun- 
tain vegetables help to regale the sore and hungry 
traveler, who blesses the soldierly host and his kind 
deft lady and daughters for their fine inn and all it 
represents; praising it as the very best place for a 
stoppage anywhere about Middle Park. 

Cowboys and Gentler Folk. 
One meets every variety of traveler here, like in 
the famed old English and Scotch taverns — from the 
devil-may-care, but really often kind-hearted cowboy, 
to the poHshed gent from the East, who between 
fishings, dons his fine garters and knee-breeches, puts 
on a fresh "biled shirt" and sports a necktie. 'Tis 
true, the cow-boy — who is not, however, either cow 
or boy, but a fullgrown steer on his hind legs — does 



f50 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

not generally indulge in the expense of lodging under 
a roof more pretentious than a log-and-mud hut or 
rough-hewn ranche hostelry. He is of the genus 
vagabond on horseback, and as often as not ties his 
horse to a stake, flings the saddle and blanket on the 
bosom of mother earth, tucks his own robe and yel- 
low rain-proof about him and snores aw^ay under the 
canopy of heaven — ready to snort himself awake 
when his turn for guard over the herd is w^hooped 
into his ear by his indelicate comrades. But if he be 
oflf duty and has received his $30 monthly wages, and 
finds an opening for a social drink, drunk and ''round- 
up," he is as free with his cash as his oaths and 
"damns" if "he isn't ready to holler''' — as he expresses 
his desire to turn into his gentle couch, when the 
shades of night have fallen and the mists of his "rye" 
mount to his brain. But gentler folk frequent the 
park ranches — the refined family, with lady-wife and 
smooth-cheeked little ones; the summering barrister 
and bachelor merchant with their files of city papers 
and copies of "Punch," "Ledger," and the like to 
supply the room of their inevitable "Morning Jour- 
nal" and "Evening Post;" the journeying students 
with virgin rod and unfired gun — softly persuasible 
by the "cock-and-bull" stories of the bear hunter, 
deer-stalker and promiscuous mountain villain. In 
the little tap-room — which happens to rejoice in no 
tap, except that in the private pocket of each provi- 
dent traveler — you see groups about the stove of the 
various men-folk of the rougher sort, while the ladies 
and cultured gentry resort to the lace-curtained and 
tastily-uphostered parlor, not devoid of its cabinet 
organ and many tinted chromos and family photos. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I5I 

But the exquisites of all betake them to their private 
apartments, amusing themselves betw^een selecting 
their "flies" for trout with literary small talk, puns 
and amorous discussions. Anon they turn them to 
their more serious occupation of the toilet, buff', but- 
toned pumps, sweet straw hats and snuff'-colored 
knee-breeches — ah! pantaloons — trunk-hose! I will 
not soon forget the harsh expression of a rough pair 
of prospectors, with their horse and pack-ass trudg- 
ing about for gold, whom we met and lunched with, 
when we described to them our fine gentlemen afore- 
said. "Bah!" said they, with grim humor, "wouldn't 
we like to take them fellers out and stick 'em up to 
their neck in some of these sloughy bottoms — roll 'em 
over in the mud and spile their duds!" Such is the 
rougher Westerner's estimate of his Eastern fellow - 
man who comes out fishing with a Saratoga trunk* 

In Frazer Creek Valley. 

In this even valley of sage on one side and mostly 
good grass on the other, one is in a basin surrounded 
by three tiers of hills leading up to the James' on S. 
E., Long's on N. E., the snow range on three sides — 
the rocky peaks, especially on the east being jagged 
and angular. This mountain meadow is part of a 
system that extends for upwards of a hundred miles, 
they say, in all directions. Sheltered and cool is it 
all, with generally rich, though not aKvays sightly 
grass. Cattle fatten wondrously here. And haying 
is as fine as in the Black Forests of Baden or the 
Valleys of Switzerland, yielding the firmest, richest 
butter and cream, thick as good molasses. 

There was, just as we entered, a goodly herd of 



152 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

one hundred and forty-four head, summering since 
June and tho' bought, thin and poor all the way from 
Iowa, for some eighteen dollars per head, for two 
and three years old, ten to twelve dollars for year- 
lings, and twenty calves, they sold for $4,500, the 
sellers losing on account of great cost of carriage. 

Our tent pitched, ditched and swung, instead of 
poled, we set out fishing and hunting. The hunting 
now, as afterwards, yielded us little small game, the 
birds consisting of chicken and bird-hawks, a good 
many robins and a few scattered twitterers. But our 
fishing yielded us sixteen or seventeen sweet trout, 
two or three fingers broad, long as your hand, or 
hand and wrist, from the by-flowing Frazer at our 
side. This was brook and spring for all purposes. 
A few slices of our streaked fat-and-lean bacon, good 
rye loaves, a brimming pot of strong but groundy 
coftee, milk and sugar to taste, with our already 
acquired mountain appetite, made a meal right more 
than royally enjoyed by the six of us down-squatters 
and etiquette-forgetters. After a very amateur pistol 
practice, in which we studiously avoided the bull's-eye 
and sometimes missed the good-sized trunk of a pine, 
we fished again; a new hand or two catching their 
first trout. What beauties with golden and silvery 
silk skin of the varied hues, from lightest to near the 
darkest browns and greens, delicate as butterflies, fine 
as colored meerschaum ! 

First Night Out. 

This bright day goes down in a painting sun and 
orange clouds. The camp-fire is smoking for supper 
and sixteen trout with some accompaniments are 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I53 

served. War-whoop call and pan-beating are scarcely 
needed to keen youth. Fine night before us, three- 
quarter moon half up the sky and our spirits mount- 
ing with it. God's angels guard my first night out! 

"Hue, custos, igitur pervigil advola, 
Avertens patria de tibi credita 
Tarn morbos animi quani requiescere 
Quidquid non sinit incolas." 

Which stanza of the Church's Guardian Angel 
hymn may be rendered: 

"Then hither, fly succoring, Guardian sleepless. 
Averting from fatherland trusted to thee, 
Distorted diseases of fancy — whatever 
Makes Sleep its inhabitants flee!" 

August \\th. — Ugh! awfully cold night. Ice on 
our bucket and heavy frost coming in our open tent 
slit. I got chilled so thoroughly in the shoulders and 
back lungs that I crouched up to my companions 
and kept them awake. Whisky and rubbing lasted 
for only an hoiu* or two — the hills, not to say moun- 
tains of cold, pressed down upon me and made me 
fear a risk of pneumonia. It reminds me forcibly of 
that other miserable night of nights in my youth, 
when three or four of us boys were taken up by the 
negro soldiers about this day and date in 1862, and 
marched off to their camp in the suburbs of Louis- 
ville, Kentucky — so kept all night in our summer 
jackets, without tent or sufficient fire and made to 
work on the fortifications against Morgan the next 
morning. My God, it hurt! 

Ho! ho! you may imagine some one w^as glad to 
see morning and two of us were out fishing by 5 A. 
M., scarcely hght We thrashed the Frazer lustily 



154 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

for upwards of two hours, and got nothing for our 
pains but an enormous load of appetite for our mea- 
gre breakfast on some fried potatoes and three fried 
fish! We eked out with our staple rye bread, rough 
butter, and groundy coftee. All soon disappeared. 
We did better for dinner — had, between us, ten fair 
troutkins. It seems from repeated experiments that 
trout will not bite early in the morning, the very time 
for most other fish. At any other times, say from 
nine or ten o'clock to eleven or twelve at night, they 
take hold readily, if one knows how to ''fly" or bait 
them. We regaled on five or six for supper. To- 
day I killed some game; a fine jack-rabbit of six or 
eight pounds weight, small birds and a squirrel, two- 
thirds the size of our southern grey, with foxy tail, 
white belly, and dark grey back, blackish snout and 
paws I spent this 

Off Evening at the Camp 

conversing with our Captain. He is a Stonyhurst 
College man of eight years study, English ways and 
fine off-hand manners, generous as his Irish nature, 
enterprising manager of the "Pay Rock" mines and 
mills, running over one hundred hands and paying 
him $350 a month. Mr. J. M. S. Egan, tho' evidently 
well informed, is modest withal, and it was only by 
dexterous questioning I got out something of his his- 
tory and college life. He has a brother a Benedic- 
tine, and a sister, a nun, I think. One of his old 
college chums is editing the Stonyhurst College Jour- 
nal, and Mr. Egan is collecting a cabinet of mineral 
ores for him and his old Alma Mater. It seems the 
Alumni have a regular club-room in Dviblin with 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I55 

officers to conduct it in the style of a good private 
hotel, furnished with library, billiards, etc. Here the 
old graduates meet from all parts of the world and 
representing all professions. Their standard and 
grade are very high here as well as at Downside — the 
Benedictines and others, as evidenced by their pupils 
taking many first prizes in the University contests' 
My other two companions, the cousins Guanella, 
Italian by name but thorough Americans and fairly 
educated, are fine young fellows. They made it very 
pleasant for -all by their hearty enjoyment of our daily 
sport and mutual reports of feats and disasters. 

The Assumption in Middle Park. 

August \^th. — Ah ! Our Lady's — bless her for- 
ever! We had the consolation of Holy Mass at 
Cozen's Ranche in their cozy parlor, and the whole 
family went to their duties, glad to get the chance of 
seeing a priest two or three times a year. Our men 
assisted, of course, and the Captain served Mass in 
good remembrance of his school days. We enjoyed 
an excellent meal with the family and went home to 
camp for a big hunt and a big "fish." We — the 
Guanellas and I — went eight or ten miles up into one 
of the mountain gorges, winding around with our 
team, thro' the patches of grass, and ascended some 
seven hundred or eight hundred feet higher to hunt 
elk. We saw some tracks more or less mouldy, had 
a hard old tramp and climb over dismal broken 
ground and fallen timber in the hot sun for hours, 
and brought back a rabbit, squirrel and plover, 
bless the mark! Our friend Egan, who went fish- 
ing, had got never so much as a bite, and we settled 



156 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

ourselves down to a capital, but rather greasy, 
rabbit-stew, which he had the fortune to condiment 
with corn, vegetables and oranges, obtained from a 
traveling huckster. Our next neighbors moved 
their camp to-day and we are alone. 

This whole valley and the next on the right have 
been lake-beds, seven or eight miles long by two 
and one half or three broad. The banks rise visibly 
on all sides and are bluffy in one point, several small 
streams feeding the Frazer from Crooked and 
Ranche Creeks. The right valley, watered by the 
latter creek, seen from a precipitous promontory is 
beautiful at a distance with its straggling riverlet 
and great soft bunches of green willow. — Musquitoes 
are so thick they won't let me write any more to- 
night. 

August ibth. — I could not say Mass on account of 
an old gentleman prostrated with nervous debility 
occupying the parlor at Cozen's. 

The sunset was fine yesterday. The floating 
clouds flaunted their waving red-tinted banners 
about the heads of the mountains "like flaming locks 
of hair," to use Ruskin's comparison. As the sun 
disappeared the long rays gilded the green foot-hills 
and threw deepening shadows aslant and atop. 
The rocky caps over timber line, refining more and 
more in the red rays, changed their dull gold to 
brighter sheen and tints pinker and deeper — so threw 
the snow drifts into whiter prominence, like rising 
foam in burnished beckers. We found strawberries, 
small but spicy in flavor, in the spurs and picked 
away as we waited for the deer to come. They 
didn't arrive. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 157 

I got up at six and finding the boys asleep at camp, 
the early bird had to wait — for its worm! We had 
better luck fishing — bagged two dozen, counting 
three we hooked out in the dark and couldn't re- 
cover. Boys tell magniloquent marine stories about 
their fishing, but we count heads. 

A Cowboy Story. 

Our Stonyhurster has had great sport "codding" 
a neighboring cowboy of genuine greenness and 
profanity, telling him of the feats of the priest. The 
said cowboy, a youth of some twenty-one years, 
shock-hair, belt and big spurs, thought the priest 
rather quiet. "But then you had to look out for 
them quiet fellers — by gosh!" He smothered his 
curses in my presence, but couldn't restrain himself 
in Egan's vicinity and would damn for everything 
and nothing. Egan made him believe that the priest 
could, with a pistol in each hand, knock bottles at 
thirty paces right and left, hitting his mark every 
crack. And he cursed and damned if that wasn't 
"powerful shootin'." The priest could hang on the 
side of a horse and lasso out of a herd any cow or 
steer he pleased by both horns: "Ge — menentely! I've 
been at the business twelve years, and d — n my skin 
if I could ever hook but 07ie horn!" Egan played 
the game well for he knew the fellow had to leave 
early next morning with his herd. But the cowboy 
swore: "If I didn't fear bein' docked, I'd come over 
and see that priest shoot and ride." 

The mountains look grander with storm clouds 
for a back-ground than in sunshine. Their bold 



158 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES^. 

summits loom up dark and distinct in shade from the 
cloudland. The green pines take a deeper, solemner 
hue. The thunder mutters and rolls longer and the 
crashes are full of sublimity. Where could one more 
enjoy the thrill of awful pleasure felt in a rattling 
storm than here! Where more realized the glorious 
hymn of the Psalmist King and poet: "The voice of 
the Lord upon the waters; the God of Majesty hath 
thundered, the Lord upon many waters. The voice 
of the Lord in power; the voice of the Lord in mag- 
nificence." You hear "the voice of the Lord," as he 
breaketh the cedars on the very mountains above 
you. "Yea, the Lord shall break the Cedars of Le- 
banon." See as in the forked tongues "the voice 
of the Lord divideth the flame of fire." Imagine the 
reality of "the voice of the Lord preparing the stags," 
on these very jungled heights; "and He will lay 
open the thick woods" they inhabit. And in this, 
His most gloriously mountain walled "Temple," in- 
deed, "all shall speak His glory." (Ps. 38.) 

It rained to-night. 

August i^th. — Raining yet — a good shower, ac- 
companied by rumbling, reverberating thunder 
We are not having good luck fishing, but somehow 
always manage to scrape a meal together. Some- 
times we hear of two professionals, now staying at 
Cozen's, from New York, catching upwards of a 
hundred trout a day — we suppose it true, but never 
counted them. We heard of an elk cow and calves 
at the head of Crooked and St. Louis Creeks, tw^elve 
miles up. 

What a consolation to get some letters in these 
untaught wilds, especially when they have been for- 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I59 

warded three times! Bless my sours friends, they 
never desert me in all my wanderings. 



To estimate the height of this valley, or park as 
they call all the lower levels and grass plots in these 
parts, one has only to look out and see the clouds 
skirting the pines on the rises of the foot-hills, some 
9,000 feet high. Numerous cloud -banks weigh down 
between the higher steeps and the snow-patched 
range. We are nearly in storm-cloud region. At 
5,280 feet to a mile, we are one and one-half mile high 
on this level; and can climb to over two miles and find 
men working mines, such as the "Ruby," owned 
and run by Barbee & Co. of Louisville, Kentucky, 
twelve miles from Grand Lake. 

August i^th. — We ate breakfast this morning, 
literally, in the clouds. Chilly. Two of us went 
fishing on Ranche Creek and caught two dozen but 
one, after striking the wrong place for fish, wading 
and getting stuck in the mud, horse and foot, in the 
sloughy bottom, that looked so softly green and 
poetical from the bluft' just anon. We came home 
wet and worn. Our mountains with "the hair float- 
ing from their fiery foreheads," reminded me of 
smoking volcanos ready to belch — or just having 
belched — flame and lava. It sweetens our pleasure 
toils to observe the features of the not beautiful but 
sublime section of these, the advance hills of the 
Rockies. 

The Guanellas struck ofl' afoot to hunt deer, and 
aver by everything truthful that they made forty-odd 
miles, which may be whittled down to twenty-five 



l6o SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

and then be considered awful. All they got for 
their tire and foot soreness was the glorious surplus 
of exercise and a pint-cup nearly full of diminutive 
strawberries. Bears, elk, deer, mountain-lions, saw 
they none, and brought not even their tracks back. 

A Deer-Capital Prize. 

August i^th. — Oh! But people must not think us 
so verdant as to come away from the Rockies deer- 
less, bearless and all. To-day we secured the capital 
prize — a glorious buck elk, some six or seven years 
old, and kicking the beam at probably eight or nine 
hundred pounds, gross weight. And the manner of 
its drawing was this: We had some nearest neigh- 
bors — nearly as green as ourselves, by the way, and 
in your ear — who, having pitched camp in our 
grove, had gone out the previous evening to hunt 
elk resorts, and stalk or wait for them near by. 
Miller, an ear-whiskered New Yorker, and his com- 
rade found a "lick" — something very like a hog- 
wallow, and trampled with innumerable elk tracks — 
in a spur of the hills, back of Crooked Creek Valley. 
They were making ready to hide and squat for the 
night, when fortunately up came the buck, within 
fifty yards of them, unsuspecting and standing 
quietly WMth his hindquarters exposed from behind 
a tree. Miller took his chance and sent a great rifle 
ball crashing thro' its buttocks, piercing thro' and 
thro', and sprawling the poor beast, dragging its 
helpless hind legs. As he crawled a few yards on 
his front feet, the hunter came up with him, scram- 
bling on some fallen pines, and shot him in the head, 
keeling him over half upright on some horizontal 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. l6l 

trunks. The two men fell on him, cut and hacked 
at hhn with a jack-knife — more like a pocket-dag- 
ger — until they sawed the body in two. After much 
grunting and stumbling under the dead weight of 
some three hundred and fifty pounds, they succeeded 
in getting the hindquarters down the hill to the 
mouth of a grassy park, and hung it by prising on 
the lower limbs of a shaggy pine. Finding they 
could do no more that night, they traveled to camp by 
moonlight, arriving there in time to catch our Egan 
on his way back from Cozen's at about 11.20 P. M. 
Egan saw the verdancy of the chaps by the silvery 
light; and knowing they had no team, put up a job 
to haul over their game for half the carcass and all 
the credit of killing. "Agreed" — it was just what 
they wanted, minus, of course, the latter clause of 
the contract, which our man prudently suppressed. 
We got a start by nine o'clock after Holy Mass, and 
by ten we pushed out of camp, with a "Hip, hip, hur- 
rah! ho! for the mountains!" all armed cap-a-pie — 
two rifles, two shot-guns, three revolvers, and two 
butcher-knives! We had to make a great round of 
some seven or eight miles, and then succeeded in 
getting our team within but a mile or two of the 
lick. It was 12 M., when we spied the grand hams 
hanging from the pine and started up the hill with 
bated breath and cocked guns towards the lick, talk- 
ing of naught, in mysterious tones, but lions, bears, 
etc., eating the carcass, and the probability of our 
having to fight for the remains. It was exciting — 
painfully so for greenhorns and "tender-feet" — the 
latter being the name for everything fresh and un- 
sophisticated in the mountains. The most danger- 



l62 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

ous thing that we encountered was the remains of 
the deer, whole and intact and dead as a door nail. 
The lick, however, was freshly trampled and showed 
how ignorant the hunters were that they had not re- 
mained and got another shot or two. While the 
butchers were getting the head ofl^ and the quarters 
divided, I took a stroll out in the jungle of pines and 
fine quaking aspens, as high as the spruces, with 
smooth, light green trunks, bare to nearly the top. 
I must confess to a feeling of shyness, not to say 
anxiety, when I had got out of ear-shot of the party. 
So after contemplating nature but a moment I re- 
turned — bearless. The head and horns being pre- 
sented to me, I thought it proper I should "toat" it 
down, which I did, swinging the head back of mine, 
and holding by the reversed horns. I found after- 
wards I had bloodied my duster, pants and boots 
from my neck to my heels. At the big pine we 
packed the quarters on the horses, slung the head on 
a pack-stick and processioned down the hill-park 
to the wagon. We got back to camp after a nearly 
eight hours' trip, dinnerless, tho' pleased and 
"enthused." Oh! how we did eat elk for our din- 
ner-supper! 

After good night-fall one of our boys fished out 
by moonlight the finest trout of the week, three in 
number, one weighing just fourteen ounces. This 
rounded our hundred trout caught for the whole trip. 

I find peculiar calculations having to be made in 
the mountains. They manufacture pumps with six 
or seven feet difference of suction from what they 
would be in the valley or plains. This peculiarity 
regards weighing and dynamics also. There are no 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 163 

lightning rods in the whole region, I understand; 
none being needed, tho' electrical displays are of 
daily occurrence. I don't recall a day in which I 
heard no thunder or saw no rain in some direction 
or other. Of these mountain parks, I heard the 
story contradicted by an old hunter, that lightning 
would play about fire arms in a storm at this height. 

August 23<^. — This the date of our camp break- 
up, when .our Captain profaned the good old Irish 
emigrant ship-song by paraphrasing it, as applied to 
our wagon-ship: 

All at 10 o'cl'k in the morning oh! 

Our gallant ship set sail — 

With "Pickles," "Dan," two quarts of oats, 

And a pint of vellow male! 

Which would require a good deal more of gloss- 
ing to make its elegant appropriateness apparent to 
the poetical reader, than it would of choice and 
pruning of words to make it smoother and less 
truthful. 'Tickles'' and "Dan" were our steeds and 
knowing ones they were, as their names indicate, 
and the rest of the verse comprises in laconic con- 
ciseness the amount of provender left for man and 
beast after our ten days' camping. No particular 
adventure marked or marred our return, except the 
unfortunate circumstance that our elk-shooters had 
the meanness to tell how they had shot that animal 
ive all shot and circumlocutorily lied around for most 
bravely. But then we stayed all adverse stomachs 
and allayed all unjust suspicions of our integrity in 
being able to let folk be deceived without direct im- 
pugning of the known truth, by simply letting the 



164 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 



ranche folks have a fore leg of our booty, in part 
exchange for some dozens of fat trout we innocently 
brought to Georgetown as the result, remotely, of 
our dexterity in fishing, and otherwise, in the Park. 
It's only a pity and great loss to the public our ex- 
ploits had not been telegraphed like President 
Arthur's. 




Grand Lake, Colorado. 




Grand Lake, Col., September ist, 1883. 
'l-iO Grand Lake, in express and four-in-hand. 
^gWe had an old-time stage driver who could 
swear on occasion, reg^ardless of surroundings. 



and whip up according to approved customs 
of brutality to animals. We were nine — ten 
with the driver — but two went on ahead as 
outriders, one of them a joking lawyer whose aching 
tooth was jumping almost as much as his horse. 
Starting at 9 A. M., we arrived at Cozen's by about 
half-past three, and at Ostrander's by 6^ P. M., kill- 
ing a grouse by the roadside and seeing no other 
small game but a squirrel or two feeding on the fine 
cones. Primitive place, the latter, situated in deso- 
late gravel and sand beds, and surrounded, at a 
distance, by curiously water-fretted rocks and sage 
heaths, supplemented by the raggedest pine fellings. 
After a thorough search no game could be scared up 
in the whole vicinity; and on being further assured 
by an honest-spoken mountaineer of whom we in- 
quired — "Be d — d, if he ever saw any grouse here- 
abouts" — we gave up th^ hunt. The hostler had 
hanging, around his characteristic waiting-room, 
some deer and doe hides and pretty spotted kid's 
furs as large as a small cur's skin. They ornamented 
the walls between the elk-horns and heads and the 



l66 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

rifle racks above the doors. The body of the house 
is of logs — pines make first-class timber for such — 
and has batten doors only, on the outside and partly 
down stairs; the traditionary make-shift of blankets 
over the other door openings being supplied by 
cheaper cotton or calico hangings. The inside is 
gorgeously papered all over with every sort of 
imaginable odds and ends of New York story paper 
pictures, giving an elegant finish, and frescoing even 
the ceilings, a la Rockies. All the party but one 
slept soundly: there was no difiiculty in hearing the 
snorers between the cracked partitions from any 
quarter. 

Oft' by early and nasty breakfast — as the supper 
had been before it — we got on, thro' the winding 
valleys, to Grand Lake by dinner on Sunday. Bet- 
ter fare, if not quarters, awaited us, and we were 
ready for everything in the shape of tasty edibles. 

Grand Lake. 

This really not misnamed lake is two to two and 
one-quarter miles in length by about three-quarters 
of a mile w^ide — seems, how^ever, very much larger 
to both gazer and rower. 8,700 to 8,800 feet above 
sea-level, it is walled in on all but the village and 
out-let sides by gloriously swelling spurs. Its head 
is fronted by the superb dome-like mass of Round 
Mountain. Pity it was not christened Grand Dome, 
for it needs but a Titanic proportioned cross to 
crown its summit in order to constitute it a more 
magnificent than Rome's Pantheon, raised aloft on 
St. Peter's colossal transept. The cyclopic K formed 
by the swinging heights on either side of Round 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 167 

Mountain and framing it in — their snow-patched 
ridges rising shoulder and shoulder above even their 
mightier rocky dome — form a picture of grandeur 
satisfying the soul as few scenes are wont to do in 
these sublime regions. The Round, unlike its neigh- 
bors, seems a solid mass of granite, reflecting shine 
and shadow like a giant's face — its deep-cut features 
rounding off' in the melting distance in well-nigh 
perfect symmetry, tho' rough and inaccessible to the 
approaching adventurous climber. 

It is Bald Mountain, with scalped elephant back, 
that swings off' to the north; and of its opposite 
neighbor I either never heard, or do not remember, 
the name. But what are names, especially when 
given by some squad of roughs or, at best, by unreal- 
izing and perhaps religionless American surveyors.'' 
What are names to whosoever feels fit to name what 
moves the conceptive powers to take in, at a glance, 
characteristics of a talking nature? The whiter 
Snowy Range closes up the higher sky midway to 
the zenith; and a row of successions of varied moun- 
tain fronts and faces stand in motionless ranks. 
Nature's Sphinxes keeping Nature's Secrets, yet 
speaking without tongues. 

The hamlet of Grand Lake, with one crane-gut 
street and on a sand level behind a shaggy foothill, 
is flanked by a brawling torrent that subsides into a 
placidly murmuring creek as it nears the lake it 
helps to feed. It has behind its back-most houses 
yet again a rugged ridge walling in a stretch of 
mountain meadow, miles square. Its new, yellow- 
pine houses are unpainted. Some of its inhabitants 
are of the rougher class, a few celebrating a grand 



l68 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

"drunk" periodically. The better citizens are begin- 
ning to frown down ruffianism to some effect. No 
house of worship is yet erected; in fact the village is 
but an infant, one however that will take some re- 
ligious spanking to train it to a model youth. Rev. 
Wm. Howlett, of Central City, was to visit, and did 
visit, this and the scattered spots of the whole Middle 
and North Park settlements; was however so unfor- 
tunate as to be blocked in by the snow, falling when 
we left. He wrote me it was good I had not waited 
for him, as he had been forced to return home, away 
around by Wyoming Territory! 

Two Weeks' Adventures, 

September \ith. — To sum up our doings and hap- 
penings, we have had rare luck fishing — our catch 
for the fortnight amounting to three bites and one 
sardine four inches long ! while fishermen by pro- 
fession go out of days and nights — the latter often- 
est — and "box" a cool seventy-five or one hundred 
trout, large and small. Hunting, we have shot 
eleven grouse, six beautiful teal with blue and 
gold and green-gold wings, eight or ten harqs and 
squirrels. 

There are two or three frame boarding houses on 
the lake and at the village, and two of log. One of 
the latter is pretty substantial and roomy, and with 
a brave show of boats and sails in its miniature bays 
over the outlet. The other remains unfinished, and 
with partitions between apartments that partition 
nothing, each occupant being allowed the luxury of 
feeding ear and eye on all the sights and sounds on 
his level. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 169 

Our host and hostess, rejoicing in the name of 
Adams, are old lUinoisans, and quite hospitable, for 
reasonable cash. Their table is of the best. Fresh- 
est trout, good beef, better venison, canned fruits 
and vegetables, served with some modicum of skill 
and maximum of good grace and the best of will, 
are commendable rations for ten dollars a week — 
and fifty cents off for every meal or night you miss. 
Curious to relate, we had fresh vegetables too be- 
times, brought out at great expense by traveling 
hucksters from Denver, who ply their trade in and 
out all the settlements in the parks, but make cus- 
tomers pay for the luxury to the tune of five or six 
cents a pound for all vegetables and fruits they buy. 
Housekeepers pay ten and twelve dollars per barrel 
for flour, and fifty cents a hundred for hauling gro- 
ceries and supplies, unless by special contract. Our 
daily plan — of course, after invoking the protection 
of God by his saints and our angels from the dan- 
gers we might meet — was to breakfast heartily and 
early as possible, sling our guns and game-bags with 
lunch for midday on our shoulders, tramp over flats 
and mountains all day, and come back for our rel- 
ished supper at 7 or 7^ o'clock, almost dark. We 
met with no astounding adventures, but heard of 
marvelous escapes, bear and deer hunts, without any 
definite limit. 

One day in Soda Creek bottom we came across 
a mother with three little children, living in the 
long absence of her husband in a cabin with floor 
and roof of dirt, miles away from any human help 
or habitation. Her sole protection consisted in two 
dogs of very ordinary size, and seemingly cowards 



lyo SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

from the way they cringed and shnik away at a 
harsh word, but one full and the other a half-blooded 
bull dog. Between whiles, as we w^ere waiting for 
her to boil us a little coffee to wash down our cold 
lunch, the brave 3^oung mother related to us how her 
two canines had had a two hours' ugly tussle with 
an ancient grizzly, making the woods and hillsides 
ring with the fierce roars and yells, barks and grow^ls 
of the furious contest. She had listened with bated 
breath — she did not say she took any particular 
means of defending the cabin — only fearful her 
precious "bulls" would be torn to pieces by the bear. 
Her fears were not allayed by the length of the fight 
and the frequent yelps of pain and rage. The brave 
little fellows came oft' with their lives, tho' minus 
sundry paws' full of hair. And their scalping was 
accompanied by smart incisions from the beast's 
great claws. The poor brutes looked considerably 
short of rations too — we had to drive them oft' half a 
dozen times during our dinner — and they were as 
ugly, especially the female, as the Miltonic dogs at 
Hell's Gate — if not so huge. 

The "Rococo" and Ptarmigan. 

Anent hunting stories, I must not forget some 
capital things our Louisvillian, Mr. John Barbee, 
used to get up, literally, to regale our fancies, while 
a frequent and most welcome guest at Mrs. Adam's 
well-supplied board. He is well built, tho' more 
athletic than stout, wears his miner's and hunter's 
canvas rig with the manly port which is so becom- 
ing; his hair is clipped close and a pair of rimless 
pebbles make his brilliant, fine blue-grey eyes more 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I7I 

brilliant still; while his incessant fund of humor, re- 
partee, puns, inventions, kept us all enamored of his 
company. One of his stories was in this sort: "The 
rococo! — ho! never heard of the beast? You poor 
ignorant outsiders.! Perhaps you don't believe it? 
Why, you know of the ptarmigan, that double-plum- 
aged timber-line grouse? It is as gray as a rock, as 
green as moss, and you can hardly distinguish it 
from the ground where it crouches." 

"Oh, yes, of course!" answers the addressed, a 
young student, versed in books rather than in life, 
and with capacity for astonishing stories probably 
invented. 

"Well, that ptarmigan changes color completely in 
winter, so that it's white as snow and you couldn't 
tell it if it were two yards from you.", 

"That's so, too; I've read of that and been told the 
facts frequently," I chimed in. 

"Yes, but that's got nothing to do with the rococo. 
You know, young man" — addressing our student, 
and ourselves over his shoulder — "this mountain fox 
has a regular ''round' like your hunting fox. When 
chased, he goes 'round and 'round a mountain top. 
And mind you, he's got the right kind of legs for the 
business — they're some inches shorter on the one 
side than on the other so that he can run on the slant 
of a hill with perfect facility, on account of the 
adaptability of his limbs to his mode of locomotion. 
And—" 

"Oh — o! Mr. Barbee, thaf s a little too strong," ex- 
postulated some two or three. 

"Too strong, thunder!. Wasn't I just now telling 
you of the timber-line grouse? Is it any more won- 



172 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

derful than that? And, as I was going on to say, 
you have to know this pecuharity of the fox — the 
famous rococo — in order to hunt him successfully. 
For, he can't run up or down — he'd tumble over — 
couldn't run on a level; he'd be lop-sided and nabbed 
in no time. Then he's got to run just 'round and 
'round; and all you're obliged to do is merely to 
find his exact circle — let him . . — him run 'round to 
where you want to catch him and just put your 
hand down, with gloves on, and lift him." 

"Ha! ha I that's a good one," was roared from all 
sides of the table, while Mr, Barbee would compla- 
cently wipe his mouth and call for "some more of 
that trout — venison: you all fairly spoil my appetite," 

He got our student in a corner one day and fairly 
])ersuaded him, judging from symptoms, the rather 
imaginative vouth had been retailing- that he was in 
danger of some malignant disease: '"Pon my word, 
I believe you've got it, and you'd better set in doc- 
toring at once." 

The patient was badly worked up all that night 
and thought he discovered more and more striking 
proofs of his having the disease, for certain — while 
he was as lusty a young fellow as you could well 
meet with just out of school. 

Ice-cold Ducking. 

We had a fair chance of testing some of our enter- 
tainer's relations of the mountain, and found him so 
truthful in some cases that we doubted whether he 
was not in earnest oftener than we believed. We 
had been told of the almost natural impossibility of 
catching a cold in the parks, and, one famous day, 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 173 

were indulged with the fairest opportunities of 
"catching our death." Coming to a series of creeks 
and shallow rivers there was nothing for it but to 
pull oft', strip up our pants and wade — in the ice- 
coldest water that runs. It failed to make us scream 
with sheer pain only because we meditated upon 
how unmanly it would be. We only halloed and 
danced — rubbing our limbs when we got over. But 
then, once or twice we attempted crossing on great 
causeways of granite bowlders, so rounded oft' that 
our hob-nailed boots shpped frequently, and, at last, 
we got a considerable wetting. But the climax 
came the third time, when to avoid a long road we 
wanted to ford the south fork of the Grand — a 
brawling half-torrent, with loose rock bed and swift 
current. My more youthful companion first at- 
tempted the venture and made it with the mishap of 
wetting|his pants and boots. Ha! I could do better 
than that. I calculated, planned — saw a clear route 
and with trousers tucked high, carefully set out — 
making a way about half across, when I tried to rest 
my feet on some stones I had spotted from the shore; 
and my misfortune began with my missteps. I 
slipped on one pesky, slimy thing and trying to 
balance and get on a better one, stumbled and sat 
down fairly in the liquid ice. Ugh! but up and try 
again. Another stumble, a lunge, the water was 
sweeping me and again I nearly went headlong, 
only I went the other way long. Laughter could 
hardly mend things — I was soaked — gun, bag, boots, 
pants, vest to halfway under my arms. And to think 
of straggling home, wet as a rat, cold as an ice-house 
filler, clothes flapping at every step. Fortunate for 



I74 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

US that we had to walk so long and briskly home. 
It was our salvation — only, 

"Most unkindest cut of all," 

we took nothing home besides our soaked selves but 
one solitary mountain squirrel, netting about as much 
meat as your moderate thumb hams, or good frog 
legs. But not the slightest cold did we catch. 

Grand Lake^ September 13//^. — Last night and yes- 
terday it was raw — raining wnth hail below, and 
evidently snowing above, whitening Snowy Range 
royally. The bald and wooded heads above us and 
below the Snowy Range are sprinkled this morning 
as if with the grey hairs of old age. It is time for 
us to take warning and be gone. As we start away 
from the hostelry, the clouds are lowering on the 
face of Round Mountain and the V — their filmy 
trails nearly sweeping the lake shores. It is a veil 
worthy of the Grand. We see our last of the sub- 
lime panorama fronting the outlet of Grand River. 
We shall row no more over the dark blue waters — 
halloo no more to the quadruple Echo, seated on the 
base of the stupendous cliff's, in comparison to which 
Rhenish Lorelei is but a mole-hill — and we shall 
receive back no more such flute-like trumpetings as 
angels might hearken to. Mirabilis Deus in altis! 

We glide into a cloud-hanging mist, finally pre- 
cipitating into fine rain, and drizzle, drizzle, is the 
tune all the way to miserable Ostrander's — a place 
I detested. Glad to get in and warm — but our din- 
ner was of the meanest as usual here; fried bacon 
swimming in its ov^^n fat, sooted hominy — all topped 
off with some compost of an apple dumpling. Hard 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I75 

eggs we got by special and repeated order, and we 
eked out on our appetites, some platters of sclimeer- 
kase and the apple — what-do-call-it? To make bad 
worse, our driver (Mills) had a brilliant case of ob- 
stinate stomach complaint, and was as sour and 
uncompromising as an ancient Persian monarch 
about getting away, heedless of driving rain, now 
mixing with slushy hail and snow. But our side of 
the corporation, mindful of No. i, and determined 
to protect ourselves, swiftly packed a lot of straw 
in the end of the wagon, appropriated two blankets, 
spread the tarpaulins over the raised spring seat in 
a sort of low-tent fashion, and snugly ensconced 
ourselves thereunder — prone but snug and defiant 
of mud and storm. Thus we weathered out the 
blowing snow storm that began to rage around us 
when but a few rods from the house. Blow! snow! 
bump! smash! scrape! trot! thump! roll! — up and 
down, right and left, we were hauled with only a 
cautious peep out on our coigne of vantage at the 
furious elements. After their rage was nearly spent, 
we could enjoy more leisurely the sight of the beau- 
tifully snow-drifted and deep-sprinkled hills, with 
the totally covered white summits of the range 
beyond, and the misty, impenetrable clouds, half- 
discovering, half-concealing, the lower foot-hills and 
the second range below the rocky peaks which 
closed up the sky. We resumed our shelter and 
fairly emerged from our manufactured bed-booth 
only when the wagon pulled up at Cozen's fine 
ranche, where we found a house full of fresh arri- 
vals, caught like ourselves in the storm. 

Frazer, September i^t/i. — As we start out to re- 



176 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

turn over the Range, snow covers the w^hole route, 
scenting and refreshing the ah* all the way back to 
Empire. Georgetown has all its higher elevations 
white — the lower besprinkled nearly all the way 
down; and the atmosphere is the opposite of what 
we left here over a fortnight since. It is bracing, 
withal. Regretfully I leave — fearful lest my first 
visit may be my last; and such is man's life! 

Georgetown^ September i^th. — The mountains ap- 
pear grander as we wing down past their suddenly 
projecting, and as suddenly retreating, faces — save 
now and anon, when longer stretches in the circuit- 
ous torrent-track afford the glorious perspective, 
shadowed on one, reflecting the white Hght on the 
other, side of the double panorama. The sun, mid- 
way in the western heavens, is already setting^br us^ 
walled in on two, sometimes on all, points of the 
compass, by the precipitous thousands of feet of 
God's masonry. How the 

. . . "King of day . . . rejoicing in the West," 

glares hotly thro' the narrow Canon, and dazzles the 
daring eye "searching his glory!" 

As we bid farewell to Clear Creek Canon, we are 
treated to a gorgeous, jeweled sunset at the City of 
Golden, which stretches on either side of the stream 
in beautiful lines between the encompassing ram- 
parts. As the reappearing sun gilds and burns the 
massy clouds over the mountain heads in the west, 
the fair full moon rises over the rock-castled ridges 
on the east. 

The palisade rocks, further on, stand out defined 
and regular in the twilight. Far down beyond the 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I77 

mouth of the Canon greens the fertile, watered valley, 
with its corn-bearing uplands and its boshy, feathery 
willow low lands. The smoke alone of man's fur- 
naces, smelting gold, obscures the scene of beauty 
and makes one sigh for the primeval untamedness 
of this mountain haunt of grandeur and softness of 
feature combined— like God's justice and mercy. 
As we look back, Nature's fortifications stretch in 
mile-wide wings with jutting buttresses to guard the 
passages of the hills of God. To the right, the 
shadowy, pale blue masses cut the sky in nobly vary- 
ing lines, and great peaks loom over them in the 
far off. 

Denver Exposition, 18S3. 

Denver, Septe?nber i6th. — The only items jotted 
from the vaunted Denver Exposition — which, like 
bad wine, needed much praise — were: a fossil tree 
from Wyoming — a section of the trunk with open 
hollow and pillared on a pedestal, full of bright, per- 
fect crystals; some others lengthwise, and lying like 
a fairy cradle bedded with crystalizations; also a fine 
show-case full of specimens furnished by the Union 
Pacific Railroad Company; among which some 
bright red and dull purple crystals in quartz and 
agate; a cross section of the "Big Tree" from Pueblo, 
which is estimated at 380 years of age and measured 
twenty-eight feet round and seventy-nine feet high. 

Singularly enough, Virginia — the State — was rep- 
resented in tobacco, ores, coals, etc., from along the 
line of the Richmond Railroad. In the fruit depart- 
ment, a luxuriance of pears, peaches, and especially 
luscious purple and white grapes from California — 
specimens of the like in the county departments of 



178 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Colorado and New Mexico — were of fine quality. 
Colorado wants to claim the finest grade of wheat 
grown anywhere. Except for the expert and con- 
noisseur of jewels in the rough, in precious ores and 
useful metals, the Exposition is a flat aftair ; it is 
only praiseworthy, lefthandedly, because it procured 
us travelers cheap round-tickets. 

But better than even its gold and precious stones 
was the grandest embossed shield of the actual 
moon, appearing above the horizon as we passed 
into the open air, in the largest magnified disk I 
ever saw — framing on her broad bosom a living sec- 
tion of landscape. As she diminishes in size she 
increases in .silveriness beyond the skill of human 
artificer, as she ascends her nightly throne. 

In the West, oh ! what glory above and behind 
the unusually dark line of the Rockies. The clouds 
form in irregular bars and parallel burnings, brighter 
and brighter, from the rose-red of the mists on the 
left and away up on the right, to the glow of the 
whitest molten gold and most fiery topaz and chrys- 
olith. Just above the verge of the mountain line is 
a uniform sea of the heavenliest mingling of color 
which I can find no name for — it is light glorified 
and glory transfigured, light of light created — the 
threshold of heaven! 

Land of gold, silver and jewels, Colorado Eldo- 
rado! this is thy fit parting greeting. With all thy 
beauty and magnificence united and blindingly 
dazzling in this focused representation of all thy 
wealth and worth, God give thee to be richer in 
virtue and rival thy sister republic of New Mexico, 
in pressing to thy rocky bosom proportionately more 
CathoHcs than any State in the Union! 



six weeks in our rockies. 179 

Pencilings of the Rocky Mountains. 

We close the Six Weeks in the Rockies with 
these pen portraits from our accommodating "Nym 
Crinkle," as he quits the plains and reaches the sight 
of the dim distant mountain land. 

Striking Colorado he pictures, sure enough, some 
greasy, rugged, slouch-hatted, or sombrero-capped 
Mexicans; portrays "Old Times on the Borders," in 
"Rice's Ranche," a solid-walled enclosure, with a 
flat-roofed dwelling and a bastioned tower, flanked 
on either hand by a park and tree rows; "New- 
Times on the Borders," in South Pueblo, an outskirt 

of which shows the broad avenue, with shaded 

t 
alleys, and the trim new frames, such as one sees 

everywhere in towns West; a life-like illustration of 

a "Middle Park" pasture such as we have described, 

not forgetting the contrast in the foot-hills: 

"Behind they saw the snow-cloud tossed 
By many an icy horn: 
Before, warm valleys wood embossed 
And green with vines and corn." 

Our dear "Grace Greenwood," the writer's cottage 
at Manitou, sweet wi,th embosking shrubbery, brawl- 
ing mountain brook, crossed by rustic bridge, is 
struck off' to the life. 

Of the "Garden of the Gods" where are Poe's 

Bottomless vales 

And chasms and caves and Titan woods 
With forms that no man can discover, 

we have no space to speak, but can refer the curious 
reader to the original "Iron Trail," and the Rev. 
Prof. Zahm, of Notre Dame's late lectures on these 
very themes and illustrated with the very prints. 



l8o SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

We may add what Mr. Wheeler testifies as to the 
health-restoring qualities of the mountain air and 
exercise — extending the endorsement, however, to 
most parts of the Rockies inhabited: 

"Now as for salubriousness, I made a special study 
of it in Colorado, and I interviewed all the scientific 
men I met. The conclusion is this: Colorado, for 
weak lungs, bronchitis, rheumatism, gout and those 
diseases that have their origin in malaria, is a certain 
cure. It is the only place in the world where a man 
can get along comfortably with one lung so long as 
he has got two legs. All forms of phthisis are bene- 
fited by the air. This is not a random statement; I 
make it from actual experience. The dry, electric 
air of such places as Manitou, to say nothing of the 
effects of the waters, has made it the resort of 
invalids." 




Prairie Diary Resumed, 



Blair, Nebraska, September 20th, 1883. 
(;^W(|^w^^HE country from Omaha north to Blair, Neb., 

\vsJ^ well occupied and cultivated to a degree be- 
^yond expectation, as to the portions used for 
agriculture. It is, for the most part, utilized as 
pasture and meadow, hay being harvested in 

^ enormous quantities; and fine herds of cattle 
and sheep, from hundreds up to thousands, browse 
in the undulating hills. The surface is, however, 
leveler than further on towards Hubbard, where the 
Omaha Indians have just vacaced a magnificent 
tract of rolling, well-watered farm and pasture lands, 
amounting to 50,000 acres. All this is only awaiting 
the United States' Commissioner's proclamation to 
be thrown open to expectants who will instantly 
take up every square rod of it. The towns, before 
we reach this ex-reservation and after we pass it, are 
flourishing and a fair proportion of them large; tho' 
north of Hubbard we strike again the Missouri River 
bottoms, thinly populated and taken up with haying 
operations on the usual gigantic scale. 

Persons conversant with this special region say, 
that between the malaria and the overflows, these 
great wides are undesirable for anything beyond 
seasonable haying. The few houses we saw were 
heavily marked by water and mud lines high up 



l82 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

over the windows and under the "boxing." The 
Iowa side north of Sioux City resembles this region 
closely — in fact is but a continuation of it on the 
opposite banks of the river Vermillion. 



Avoca, Minn.^ September 22d. — Fulda is just now 
the center of interest, the two most prominent 
Bishops connected with the Colonization Society, 
Rt. Rev. Dr. Spalding, President, and Rt. Rev. Jno. 
Ireland, having come to give a business push to the 
county, before they proceed to the spiritual object of 
their visit to the Convent at Avoca, and to dedicate 
the finished Church of Currie. Fulda is sustaining 
its reputation and going ahead with solid strides. 
More of the twin lake shores is being laid out in 
building lots on ground sold by the two Bishops on 
easy terms. The upper lake, contiguous to town, 
has been named Lake Ireland, the lower, Lake 
Spalding. About five acres on the extreme end of 
the former has been sold, this morning, for $30 per 
acre, to the town clerk. A new $3,000 public school 
is nearly completed. 

There is a practical project on hand to extend 
another railroad north and south thro' Fulda and 
Avoca, and taking in the vicinity of Currie and Mr. 
Jno. Sweetman's large purchase. This will open out 
the superb Des Moines River country and connect 
with Tracy. 

The surveyors are already on the route, and will 
reach Murray County in a few days. The thing is 
put down as a certainty by the people, and will be 
of immense advantage as giving direct connections 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 183 

North, and opening up the coal fields of Iowa to the 
prairie inhabitants, whose fuel is such a large item 
of expense. 

CuRRiE Church Dedication. 

This 23d September is the date of the long-looked- 
for dedication of Currie Church, built at the sole 
expense of the munificent gentleman, Jno. Sw^eet- 
man. It is an elegant building, commodious and 
finely appointed, from the superb bell in the front to 
the carved altar in the sanctuary. The priest's resi- 
dence is nearly finished and matches well with the 
church. The ceremonies of dedication brought the 
whole surrounding country to witness the grand 
pageant — grand for these parts — two Rt. Rev. Pre- 
lates, assisted by a number of priests, performing the 
sacred rites, after the public dinner furnished for all 
the world in the town hall. The reverent crowd of 
the faithful formed the living crown of the church 
to be dedicated as God's House — symbolical, as they 
girded the walls, of their own future exaltation, when 
they are taken up to build the walls of the Celestial 
Church. How appropriate the Chorister's magnifi- 
cent hymn of the ecclesiastical service: 

CELESTIS URBS JERUSALEM. 

"Celestial city, Jerusalem! 

Of peace the vision blest, 
. That high of living stones are built 
To heaven's starry crest: 
In sponsal rite art belted round 
By thousand — thousand angels crowned! 
O thou in happy lot espoused, 
With Father's glory dowered; 



184 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

O Queen, most lovelj of the fair 

By Spouse's grace o'ershowered; 

With Christ the prince in wedlock joining — 

City with heavenly brilliance shining! 

Here sparkling gemmed with precious stones 

Stand wide to all, the portals; 
For clothed in virtue's Godly deeds 

Are thither led, e'en mortals, 
Whom passionate with Christ's true love 
Nor torments, nor e'en death can move. 

By pruning chisel's saving strokes. 

And smoothing touches oft 
Of mason's mallet, the polished stones 

Build all the pile aloft; 
And shaped with goodly joints aright 
Are raised to crown the building's hight," 

Ten Days at Buffalo Lake. 

Septetnber 2^th. — In a stay of ten days at the resi- 
dence of Mr. John Sweetman — the farm villa of 
Buffalo Lake — it is needless to comment on the in- 
formal hospitality one receives and the home-like 
feeling that is cultivated in a few days' converse 
with the managing director of the Irish Coloniza- 
tion Company. Leaving aside the confidential pleas- 
ures of indoors, our journal proceeds to record that 
we younger folk passed most of our time on the 
prairie at our prescribed sports. To-day's luck sums 
up the bagging of some ten ducks and chickens — 
four ducks lost in the sloughs, and a good deal of 
ammunition wasted in shooting holes in the air. 
However, we will keep the table in game, and inter- 
change our fine English-cooked roasts with dressed 
duck, chickens and smaller fry. 

Septefnber z^th. — Learning w^e could get a trained 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 185 

setter from an old hunter of the vicinity, we sped 
over in haste to secure him. But bother! either thro' 
our own fault or his wildness — we put it on the latter, 
of course — we had a chance to lose half a dozen 
chickens, and "dropped" one only. 

September 26th. — Mr. Walter Sweetman accom- 
panied us on the hunt over the rolling hills and 
sloughy valleys of the farm, and great exercise did 
we enjoy in the free, glorious air. If the "stillness 
of the desert fill the fierce Arab with rapturous en- 
joyment," as Cardinal Newman writes in his "North- 
man Character," how much more could we delight 
in the unrestrained liberty of our blossoming prairies! 
The feeling of glorious independence from the tram- 
mels of fashion and "society" often makes us shout 
aloud for sheer joy, thanking the great God for these 
fenceless wilds, where there are no bounds but the 
horizon around and the sweet skies above. The 
grand thinker, Chateaubriand, joins with the strong 
poet, in his "Bride of Abydos," in seeming to limit 
this indescribable rapture to the nomad of the Sa- 
• hara; but they, like Ruskin, had something to learn 
about our grand prairies. Besides this singular sen- 
sation, however, we scarcely got to-day enough 
game for our sharpened appetites — a brace compris- 
ing one water and one land bird, with four ducks lost. 

September 2'jth. — Again, however, we have had 
what we call another good day, securing ten pieces — 
one chicken out of several flocks. People not au 
fait in hunting, like ourselves, will count this great 
luck, and professional nimrods will turn up their 
noses and give expression to their contempt of such 
trifling by a boisterous gufiaw. Let them! 



l86 six seasons on our prairies. 

Murray County Fair. 

Ctirrie, September zStk. — To-day, raw and un- 
promising as it is, we have had our County Fair at 
the pro-count}^ seat of Murray. In default of an 
official report, I can say that two priests of us made 
ourselves conspicuous by handling vegetables and 
products of all kinds, weighing and measuring by 
the inch, yard and hour. It was a really creditable 
display. We have said: "This is the land of roots, 
pa7' excellence,^' and here is palpable proof we were 
not hardly doing justice to the various and enormous 
productions of this soil. 

Pumpkins! but let us not mention such monstrosi- 
ties! Squashes! Reader, you never saw the picture 
of such squashes. The beets and rutabagas, Nor- 
wegian turnip, and other turnips were as big as a 
child could carry. Potatoes, any variety! Size: from 
eight or ten ounces to two and one-half pounds 
apiece. Cabbage ? But away with such ! Peas, 
beans; corn, green yet, and succulent for roasting 
ears. We had all the figures down, but it boots little 
to trumpet what talks for itself. One lady relates 
she had received nineteen premiums on as many 
kinds of vegetables. Outside were, of course, the 
horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, turkeys, wild geese 
tamed, etc. All stood fair. 

September 2^th. — Eight ducks and a brace of prai- 
rie chickens rewarded to-day's labors by land and 
water, somewhat counterbalancing matters, tho', by 
tossing a $30 rifle overboard on reaching for the last 
fowl. 

September -ipth. — Seven more ducks to-day. 



six weeks in our rockies. 187 

Herds and Grasses. 

But from ducks to cattle is not as much a change 
of subject here, at this season, as in other parts. 
Farmers of considerable means do not farm so much 
as graze and rear cattle. It is the same in southern 
ao^ricultural districts among' men who have made 
enough by hard knocks to lie back on their oars and 
rest while their beeves and hogs are fattening, and 
coining good trade-dollars. Of hogs, of course, there 
are comparatively few here, but much more atten- 
tion and care are spent upon cattle and sheep. 
Where prairies are limitless, your herds and flocks 
can roam at their sweet will. But it is troublesome 
and expensive in other respects, and you must pro- 
vide for enclosures of some sort, meadows, corrals. 
But again, the prairie grass will not stand the con- 
stant grazing and trampling under which tame 
grasses will survive. Hereupon comes a question, 
sprung this morning, on observing that the meadow 
on the hillside and near the residence of Mr. Sweet- 
man was wearing out, and on being told he had sowed 
tame grass over this and similar spots. 

Nature has to be aided and supplemented in this 
matter as in the other of timber planting. It may be 
in place to extract somewhat from Prof. Thomson, of 
Nebraska's observations on 

Tame Grasses in the West, 

as pertinent here: "In the prairie regions of the great 
West, for some time after the country is settled, only 
native grasses are needed. The conditions of a 
settled country are not congenial to the wild grasses. 
As a rule, tame grasses furnish feed about a month 



l88 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

earlier in the spring, and the same length of time 
later in autumn, than the wild grasses. When the 
wild grasses begin to dry up in the fall they are 
tougher than tame grasses with the exception of 
the buffalo and bunch grasses of the arid region 
along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. 
There is no kind of forage which will fatten cattle 
faster than our native prairie grasses during the 
growing season, from the middle of May to the 
middle of August." 

The last statement must be modified for regions 
parallel with St. Paul, and not further south than 
Yankton, by pushing the latter date into September 
at least, if not also in putting forward, ordinarily, the 
former to perhaps the end of May. The subsequent 
advice about making tame hay will not apply to 
these parts, and hence to the valleys of Western 
Montana, for many years to come: 

"Tame hay is more nutritious, but stock usually 
like good prairie hay better. Tame hay must be 
made at a season when rains are frequent; while the 
best time to make prairie hay is in the month of 
August and the early part of September, when, as a 
rule, but little if any rain may be expected." 

Whereon we refer the interested reader to obser- 
vations scattered thro' our summer journal. "... In 
the latter part of the growing season tame grasses 
furnish a better quality of feed than the wild sorts. 

"The first and simplest mode is to sow tame grass 
seed, especially timothy and blue grass, on the native 
prairie, when it first begins to fall from tramping or 
too close feeding. This seeding should, if possible, 
be done early in the spring, on one of the late snows. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 169 

If the soil, when soft, be well scarified with a sharp 
harrow, it will increase the chances of a catch. With 
good seed sown in this wa}', success is almost certain. 

"The only kinds of tame grasses that have been 
extensively tested west of the Missouri, are: Timo- 
thy, Kentucky blue grass, and orchard grass. Only 
red clover and white clover have been grown on a 
scale sufhciently extensive to justify absolute con- 
fidence '' 

October ist. — Mr. Sweetman brings in some nine- 
ty-three quarts of cream for the creamery at Slayton. 
This or nearly as much is the daily output of forty- 
odd cows, which yield about $1,500 a year in this 
way. His two hundred head of cattle and some 
eight or ten horses are fed in vsdnter with the four 
hundred and fifty or four hundred and seventy-five 
tons of hay put up — except the milk cows, which 
receive extra feed. The triple stables are immense, 
and capable of comfortably housing all the live 
stock. A large wind-mill supplies water from a well 
for house, creamery and stables. Some six or seven 
men run the farm and stock. Cattle from Buffalo 
Lake are going to market only next year — the third — 
for cattle calved here in the year 188 1. 

October id^ '}^d and \th. — At night we have been 
having heavy frosts, the thermometer ranging from 
38 to 25 degrees above zero. Ice formed several 
nights in a hard scale on watery puddles, even on 
the slough shores. Snow^ is reported this week from 
St. Paul, Mankato and Sleepy Eye. vSome fog and 
droppy rain out of the mist to-day constitute the 
weather record. 



190 six seasons on our prairies. 

Fall Crop Reports. 

Without official inquiries or figures, I learn from 
private sources of farmers here and about, that wheat 
has ranged in yield from thirteen to thirty-one bush- 
els per acre, the average being somewhere about 
twenty or twenty-odd for this and the adjoining 
region. Oats run from forty to sixty bushels — one 
poor fellow next door to us having the latter, and 
almost everybody exceeding the former. Flax runs 
variously from twelve or thirteen to eighteen bushels, 
and sells for from one dollar to one dollar and five 
cents. Oats brings only fifteen cents; wheat about 
eighty cents. The corn yield has been light. Frost 
has caught considerable in flat lands in the lower 
levels. In general, treeless prairie corn can scarcely 
be accounted except for fall feed. Vegetables, how- 
ever, are just the reverse. They grow enormous, 
with careful culture; and good, with almost next to 
none. Large quantities of fine potatoes, fine cucum- 
bers, onions, beets, turnips and beans, tolerable cab- 
bage and parsnips, have been gotten out of this patch 
of ground — second time ploughed — just over the road 
from the priest's house. And I can aver it has all 
not received the cultivation that would re-yield seed 
elsewhere. Here are some samples from our neigh- 
boring county, Nobles. Tho' but newspaper reports, 
they coincide so closely with personal observations 
that they may be received with but few "grains of 
salt:" 

" Garret Fagin threshed sixteen bushels of flax, 
twenty of wheat and fifty of oats per acre. James 
Carey threshed fifteen bushels of flax, eighteen of 
wheat and fifty of oats per acre. Dick O'Hearn 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I9I 

threshed eighteen bushels of wheat, twelve of flax 
and fifty of oats per acre." 

"Mr. William Harrison has been threshing some. 
His wheat turns out about twenty bushels per acre, 
and his oats fifty. Sam. Harrison had one piece of 
wheat that went thirty-one bushels per acre." 

"Tom Burke threshed thirteen bushels of flax to the 
acre. Tom Fagin threshed twelve bushels of flax, 
twenty bushels of wheat, twenty-one bushels of bar- 
ley. Tim Larkin threshed thirteen bushels of flax, 
forty-seven bushels of oats, eighteen bushels of wheat 
to the acre. Mr. R. O'Day has been threshing on 
the Boyle farm, north of town, and gives the follow- 
ing results: From seventy acres of wheat they got 
1,400 bushels; one hundred acres of rye, 375 bushels; 
nine acres timothy, seventy-seven bushels, and flax 
478 bushels, or fifteen and one-half bushels to the 
acre." 

From Pipestone County Fair we have this general 
corn record: 

"Considering the season, corn of astonishing size 
and in great abundance was displayed. Ears from 
twelve to fourteen inches long and proportionately 
large in circumference, and stalks ten to twelve feet 
high, do not grow every year in every county, but 
such were on exhibition at the Fair." 

J. T. Suftron's exhibit of pumpkins: "On less than 
an acre of ground planted promiscuously thro' the 
corn, he has raised one hundred and seventy, a large 
majority of them perfectly ripe, and many of them 
extra large size, three of which weighed respectively 
forty-six and one-half, sixty-two and one-half and 
seventy pounds. The two largest were purchased 



192 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

on sight by the enterprising Close Brothers, to be 
placed on the tables in their office for exhibition, to 
show what Pipestone soil can produce." 

From Jackson County: "Reports and big samples 
continue to roll into the 'Republic' office of the im- 
mense and perfect crop of potatoes raised in Jackson 
County this year. We last week spoke of a citizen 
of Jackson raising one and one-half bushels of white 
elephant from two potatoes, and now in comes Mr. 
Gillis and scoops the Jacksonite by raising a plump 
two bushels of the same kind from the 'same amount 
of seed. And Barney Qiiinn, the jovial settler up 
the river, from the Emerald Isle — he has raised some 
'whoppers' of the star variety, and reports getting an 
honest ten bushels of the raspberry variety from 
twelve seed potatoes. H. S. Schlott, of this village, 
has grown large quantities of several new and choice 
imported grades." 

Finally from Murray — our own county — we pre- 
sent these: 

Thos. Doolin threshed six acres of wheat that 
yielded thirty and one-half bushels per acre, and four 
acres of flax which went twenty-eight bushels clean. 

Mr. H. Stanley's threshing machine, run by Wm. 
McDermet, threshed seven hundred and ten bushels 
of oats for H. Scovell, of Cameron, from morning 
until 10 o'clock. 

Only one, A. B. Smith, raises 1.370 bushels of oats 
on eighteen acres, or seventy-one bushels per acre! 
which is hard to swallow. 

October ^th — Sunday. — At leisure from the busy 
flurry of the moilful week, we can rest on the Lord's 
day, aye, and Lady's day, the solemnity of the 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I93 

sweet Holy Rosary. To-day is blowy and rainful, 
fitfully. Heavy summer rain, and distant thunder 
prevailed last night, and the low, soft, white moun- 
tains in the East, that looked earth-mountains of 
snowy piling, had melted into the leaden rain sky, 
until just now, when the sun, struggling with the 
watery vapors, gave signs ol conquering. Autumn 
and Summer are contending loo, and suggest the de- 
scriptive lay: 

PRAIRIE 0( rOBER. 
God give unbosomed ^. immer 

Yet awhile to stay: 
Nor muffled Winter cii.nber 
Prairie sky and way! 

To-day is lowering, leaden — 

Mournful pipes the breeze; 
Blades yellow, leaflets redden 

— Fall hath painted these. 

But yesterday was blooming, 

Softly warm the clouds! 
Ah me! the Winter's looming, 

Fierce in snowy shrouds, 

October's life November 

Chills and palsies thro': 
Bleak winds blow, man, remember, 

Suinmer's dirge for you. 

Yet hope! the sun grows whiter, 

Fleece clouds gem the blue. 
— Death's life foreruns a brighter — 

Be among the few. 

Sprite month, days russet — shady, 

Whose each Sunday's thine, 
Conduct us, Angel's Lady, 

Thro' life's chequered shine! 



194 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PKAIRIES. 

October ()th. — I see reports of Indian summer 
visiting our neighbor counties. I believe it has come 
in its northern guise to our Avoca. The three past 
days have been warmer; in fact, quite warm at times. 
Even the nights have been a trifle close until frost 
accompanied the clear evenings. Soft clouds and 
warm tinted sunrises and sets have brought geniality. 
The birds twitter some again. I don't find the sweet 
haziness, but seldom at least — that is a characteristic 
of lower latitudes. The equableness is disturbed by 
fretful gusts of storms and wind. The weather 
changed perceptibly yesterday evening from what it 
was in the morning. At first, before noon, out foot- 
ng after a stray flock of ducks or chickens , I got 
into a great lather of perspiration, well madefied 
thro' and bathed. Riding in the afternoon, a good 
fall overcoat was a necessity. And so it changes. 

The muskrats are building high and narrow, and I 
heard a shrewd farmer predict an autumnal winter, 
more open than usual. The muskrats know if Ven- 
nor don't. 

October loth. — Mr. Drueke, agent of a large grain 
firm, reports thirteen car-loads of flaxseed of four, 
hundred and fifty to five hundred bushels each — 
since about a month — received and shipped from 
here. He paid ninety-five cents. It advanced to 
$1.05 here. Rumor says to $1.17 in Fulda. The 
agent expects to export some 30,000 bushels of flax 
from here by January ist. Up to last Saturday 
Avoca had shipped twice as much seed as Fulda; 
and only Hadley, twelve miles above, had reported 
more. Wonderful, tho' natural, to relate, only thirty 
bu. hels of wheat have left here; people only raising 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I95 

for their own consumption. One Thos. Hargedon 
says he has housed one hundred and fifty bushels of 
wheat — some damaged — a tolerably large yield, if 
rightly measured. 

Our Indian summer has been rudely broken into 
last night and this morning by a fall of snow, which 
melts pretty much as it touches ground. The roofs 
and trees were plentifully sprinkled with a light 
coating of white at six A. M. Our hunting for the 
past ten days has been sporadic, resulting in only 
scattered braces of duck and trios of chickens, in all 
about sixteen pieces, including some yellow-shank 
snipe. Some fine specimens of snow-white, long- 
billed pelicans were shot at Mr. Dan. Murphy's in the 
last fortnight. They had the great pouch under the 
bill, and were so white they were mistaken for 
swans on the wing. Ducks are swimming by hun- 
dreds and thousands; some seeming inclined to 
migrate. Geese quack about every day. Chickens 
even yet are found in quantities. All game is shy 
and hard to get at. 

By II or 12 M., the snow has, after a more violent 
effort at a little blowing storm, subsided, and the 
evening has been of fitful sunshine. Wintry clouds 
hang about sullen and cold. Conquer Autumn! 

Nuns' School Examinations." 

October \zth. — In view of the superficiality and 
humbuggery of public school examinations of four- 
teen and fifteen-year-old girls for teachers — some 
right here, who are given certificates or offered such 
before their papers are examined — it is refreshing to 
see the semi-annual examination reports of the III 



196 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

and V Forms, in the schools of higher grade of the 
Nuns of the Holy Child. Here are specimen ques- 
tions answered by a girl thirteen years old in her 
third year: Geography — Draw from memory map 
of Central Europe. What rivers empty into the 
Baltic, North, Mediterranean, Adriatic, Black Seas, 
etc.? For what are these cities remarkable, and 
where situated? — Lyons, Sevres, Ley den, Tokay, 
Trieste, Basle, Pisa, Lausanne, etc. (The map drawn 
is excellent, fit for copy for the press. It is colored, 
and the principal rivers, mountains, cities, and many 
of minor importance are given, especially in France 
and Germany.) Natural Philosophy — What is com- 
pound motion? Illustrate. (And the illustrations 
are real pieces of art for a child, better than most 
printed ones.) Define Cohesion, Adhesion, Capil- 
lary Attraction. Why do salts, etc., dissolve in 
water? What is motion? What are gravitation, 
gravity, weight, etc.? General Knowledge — What 
do you know of the history of pottery? General 
characteristics of a family of birds — describe? De- 
scribe process of making leather. French — Qu ap- 
pelle-t'on verbes irreguliers? Temps simples de Fin- 
dicatif, subjonctif, des verbes: savoir, dire, courir — 
leur auxiliares? Ecrivez une lettre descriptive: Ceque 
vous savez sur le riz, le clou de girofle, le cafeier, la 
canne a sucre. Latin — Of possessives, declension, 
conjugation. Translation, parsing. Nine questions. 
(And these, with the ones above in French, are an- 
swered rather better than some others; the French 
notably so, because of the French extraction of the 
pupil.) United States History — Principal battles 
fought in Revolutionary war: year, name, American 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I97 

and British Commanders, victors, accounts of par- 
ticular battles, Burgoyne's campaign, sketch of Wash- 
ington's life (map is attached of American Indians, 
a rather difficult subject for grown persons.) En- 
glish History : Chart of Tudors and Stuarts, Lady J. 
Grey, account of reign (.'') of Oliver Cromwell, Ar- 
mada, Elizabeth. 

Church History — St. Paul's journey with large 
map (good.) The ten persecutions, emperors, and 
popes, and other martyrs. Heresies between I 
and VIII centuries. Apologists, Latin and Greek 
Fathers, sketch of two Saints, St. Paul of Thebes, 
St. Cecilia. 

Grecian History — Map of Archipelago and 
Greece, and Coast of Asia. 

E^iglish Literature — History of Robert of Sicily. 
Explain: 7neet^ blare^ Saturnian, reign^ motley garb, 
dais, clerk. Derive: Chant, sedition, etc., twenty 
words. 

Grammar — Parsing. What are the three ele- 
ments of English? Describe Greek elements: From 
what other sources are some words derived? (And 
the child gives a list of four to six words from thir- 
teen different languages, at thirteen years old! The 
report is, however, genuine without a doubt; for it 
abounds with faults of grammar and specially orthog- 
raphy, blamable much on her French origin.) 

The V Form, by a girl sixteen years old, em- 
braces Astronomy, Higher Grammar, Literature, 
Physical Geography, Physiology, Mediaeval His- 
tory, etc. 

I. Astronomy — (with tolerably drawn map of 
North Polar section of the sphere, drawn from 



198 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

memory, as those given above.) Signs of Zodiac 
for three months, North ecliptic constellation, 
Hydra and Centaurus. 

II. Grammar — Analysis of Milton's "Sonnet on 
Blindness." Uses of "it." Gerund. Table of Aux- 
iliaries: strong, weak and mixed verbs: Do^ be- 
ware, q7ioth, ought. Infinitives. 

Literature — Shakespearean Dramatists, dates and 
works. Writers and Poets from Elizabeth to Resto- 
ration. Ben. Johnson, on "Decay of Drama," Lives 
of Cowley, Waller or Benton and Hobbes. Criticize 
Milton as poet and prose writer, his works, "Paradise 
Lost." 

IV. Geography — Character of Ocean Currents, 
(fairly good and full). Explain all about them, in 
seven questions. Atmosphere, Winds, Monsoons, 
Routes, United States to Europe, Australia, Map of 
vicinity of New York city (more than most people 
know). 

V. Physiology — Skin, Hands, Nails, Teeth, Voice, 
Lungs, Heart. 

VI. Mediceval History — Eight Crusades — Table 
of Summary, Fred. II., Fred. Barbarossa, Emancipa- 
tion of Cities, Feudalism, Chivalry, Sketch of Knight 
Templars. Contemj^orary Sovereigns of IV Epoch, 
with great men. Table of events and persons in V 
Epoch of Middle Ages, RudoljDh of Hapsburg, 
"Golden Bull," "Hundred-years" War. Council of 
Constance, "Sicilian Vespers," Rise of Ottoman 
Empire and taking of Constantinople, 1453- Map 
of all. 

Avoca, October 11th. — Record of Mr. Mike Shan- 
key's threshing: J. Fitzsimons, one hundred, and 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. I99 

eighteen bushels flax. Phil. Flynn, wheat, one hun- 
dred and thirty-three bushels; flax, two hundred and 
fifty-one and one-half bushels; oats, four hundred 
and ninety bushels. Jno. Johnson, wheat, sixty- 
eight; oats, sixty-one; flax, one hundred and twenty- 
five. Pat. Dwyer, over nine hundred of oats; two 
hundred and thirty flax; some four hundred left to 
thi'esh; wheat over two hundred. Pat. Farrell, oats, 
seven hundred bushels. Lawrence Brien, i,ioo 
bushels oats from twenty-two acres; wheat, three 
hundred bushels from eighteen acres; barley, two 
hundred and thirty-six from nine and one-half acres; 
flax, one hundred and five bushels from twelve 
acres; peas, seventy-five bushels to the acre. Pete 
Conroy, of Avoca, twenty -seven bushels of wheat to 
the acre; fifty-two of oats; seventeen of flax; had 
very tolerable corn. 

Prairie Indian Summer. 

October \2th, i^th, i th and i^th. — Our Indian 
summer has resumed its milder sway, and we are 
having glorious days and fine, tho' hoar-frosty, 
nights; the frost making almost as thick a layer as 
the actual snow we had. Birds of hardier kind are 
about yet, and I have seen several yellow and other 
colored butterflies. Fhes trouble one but little, still 
make their presence felt. About lo to 2 P. M., or a 
little later, the sun is quite warm to the exerciser. A 
hearty sweat can be had on short notice for the chase 
of a chicken or duck. We have enjoyed several 
sunsets, one specially fine colored and the sunrises 
are, if not warm, clear and beautiful. The painting 
the prairie fires, now rampant, make on the horizon 



200 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

are nearly as varied as the clouds. The smoke slants 
up in a rippling mass, dark pink, even crimson, be- 
times The flames remind one of fiery sunset clouds, 
except, of course, they change more rapidly, and lick 
up into the curling smoke with their great forked 
tongues. 

Looking at the village to-day from oft' in the prai- 
rie, it has the appearance of w^hat we enjoyed in the 
young spring time, save for an undefined haziness. 
Trees are fast losing their verdure, and still more 
their leaves. I just learned one could buy a tolerable- 
sized tree, on a district about a lake some distance oflT, 
for seventy-five cents. Cheap fuel can be had at 
Mankato for $2.50 or $3.00 per cord, the freight to 
here of course extra. It is hard and good. 

October i6th. — High cold wind blew from south- 
east nearly all day, and we have stirred out but little. 
Struggling Sol was ruled out, and his fitful shine but 
added gloom to the mournfully piping winds. This 
is surely too cold for even Indians in summer. 
The rawness eftects more than the cold. We have 
had several fine messes, Fridays principally, of frog- 
legs. The creatures have been swarming, jumping 
the lake banks in living cataracts, for these two or 
three weeks, all about the prairie in several rods of 
the water. They are the orthodox green and brown 
edible frog, proved so by the good eating we have 
got by frying and stewing them. Pity some young- 
sters do not get up an industry in frogs, killing them 
with sticks, or better, beating them down to the lake 
shores, where others could hold long nets and scoop 
them up by the literal thousands. They would sell 
well in any city or town of size. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 20I 

October i^th. — The blow from Southeast turned 
in some rain upon us last night, and to-day it has 
been keeping up a steady gale of some velocity, ac- 
companied by intermittent, driving rain and some- 
times sharp showers. It was cold, even cuttmg, on 
about noon and up to dark. 

October iStk. — The weather has changed to the op- 
posite pole of crystal clearness, comfortable warmth 
in sun and with exercise, ushering in with a bright 
sunrise, and going out with a roseate sunset, fringed 
with galleons of crimson edged with fiery jewels. 
The night fell under one of those topazine skies, 
lustrous, shaded, and contrasted against blue islands — 
a face of a nun in her hood of white and serge. 
Our but little waned moon shone out in her em- 
pyrean sphere, softening all. We had a short hunt 
before dinner, and before supper. We got but one 
fine-plumaged wood duck out of two water fowls 
we shot, and the ones which flew away with possi- 
ble loads of shot in and about their feathery coats. 
If a cat has nine lives, surely some drakes can boast 
of ten. The other day we killed a regular north- 
western diver, and for want of better had it served 
up to some newcomers, who devoured it all in a 
trice, and smacked their lips over it. 

Tricks on Travelers. 

This is not the first we have had cooked for con- 
noisseurs. We put a mud hen or two on the table 
before some Eastern ecclesiastics, and they ate them 
without a whimper. Even a full-blooded John Bull 
averred there was nothing peculiar or distasteful 
about them, tho' he didn't eat more than a taste. 



202 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

The worst joke we have practiced was to mix a 
prairie squirrel — practically a burrowing rat — before 
an eminent dignitary on the same platter with a 
rabbit or hare. He ate several quarters of it without 
changing countenance. And yet here comes an 
English-bred and nourished gentleman, who uses 
profane expressions v^hen you mention eating frog- 
legs to him! We'll serve him some for dinner to- 
day in a stew or fry, and wager he'll eat and drink 
without nausea, suckino^ froo^s' toes! 

Some one characterizes ''a Scotchman as one who 
is never at home except when he is abroad;" an 
Englishman, "one who is never contented save when 
he is grumbling;" an Irishman as "an individual con- 
tradictory, who is never at peace unless he is fight- 
ing." Bon-77iot^ not far from the truth. I believe — 
I know — English eat too much, not to speak of 
drinking; "thinking they should starve," as a gentle- 
man just over and well acquainted with their habits, 
says, "if they didn't eat five meals a day — at least 
four square ones. At 9 A. M. a great, solid break- 
fast; lunch big as an ordinary meal, only cold (and 
who would not lunch on English cold beef roast?), 
at meridian; dinner proper at 4 P. M., and with tea 
at six; a gross supper between 9 and 10 P. M. To 
this may be added a tasse de cafe, when they awake 
in the morning, if they do before regular breakfast 
time. It is rather discouraging on sacerdotal spirit- 
uality to learn these five meals are the ??iot cVordre 
in an English seminary." 

I fancy it will be rather a disadvantageous change, 
if not an impossibility in the line of mortification, 
for those accustomed to five or even four dainty 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 203 

meals, to come down to two rough repasts on some- 
thing as strong as corned beef or uncorned pork 
and sourkraut, as is so often the practice here in 
winter. People naturally staying up late and rising 
not much before nine or ten o'clock in the morning, 
in the short cold days of only about half the length 
of the summer days — eight or nine hours — it would 
be folly to eat more than say two regular meals and 
a luncheon. One finds, however, his appetite calls 
for the substantial, and he can stow away so much 
at a sitting that he will not be considered safe in 
replenishing too soon. 

October \<^th. — Our capture of frogs this morning 
was a splendid failure, as the cold, biting winds 
drove the poor leapers into their hiding places. Of 
the millions generally seen hopping around we found 
but a few benumbed little stragglers, not worth 
attention as game, and too pitiable to touch. 

The northern breezes have played havoc with our 
Indian summer again, and nearly stripped the re- 
maining leaves, already 

"... Fallen into yellow .... and sere." 
This fits pre-eminently the description of the greater 
grasses ; nothing apparently remaining green but 
scattered bunches of blades on the sides of the new 
breaks. Last night a skim of ice from one-half to 
three-fourths of an inch coated the small sloughs, 
and the water left over in buckets and barrels froze 
an inch thicker still. It was some warmer at and 
after noon, turning again bitterly cold towards sun- 
set, heavily beclouded. I begin to believe the ducks 
and geese are migrating or proximately preparing 
to move South. They fly about violently and rest- 



204 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

lessly, higher than usual. Messengers seem scurry- 
ing back and forth, bent on business communications 
requiring dis] atch. Flocks are growing larger, and 
crowd into greater masses. There are no vegetable 
islands on upper Lake St. Rose, as we had last fall. 
On these used to congregate the flocks of smaller 
and greater snipe, and tiny water birds; and how- 
ever ungenerous it may seem, we took advantage of 
the innocence of the creatures, and, rowing up, 
poured broadsides into them that soon filled a good 
pail with the choicest game. Our once carefully 
rigged, flatbottom sail-boat is lying up at "Arbor 
Point" in a dilapidated condition — the hulk under 
water, the rudder broken, mast loosened at the base, 
and sail flapping. How I could tweak the nose of 
that opposite and obstinate Norseman who took the 
"sail" to get home, and tied it so carelessly the gale 
broke it loose and drifted it here to ruin. 

I heard to-day of a farmer who has two dozen 
hogs he has fattened on unripe corn and is ready to 
sell. Others might imitate this scheme. 

Flax has advanced to $1.07 at Avoca, and $1.12 at 
Fulda; tho' raisers say they would rather sell here, 
five cents a bushel not paying for hauling further. 

October 2\st. — We predicted snow last night; and 
to be sure, we peep out this morning and see the 
ground covered to the depth of several inches and 
flakes still falling. The wind is from the southeast, 
and it is not distressingly cold, in fact much more 
pleasant than yesterday or the day before, overhead, 
tho' the roads became very muddy this afternoon. 
The snow held up about 10 A. M., and melted 
nearly all away by night, day setting cold and 
drizzly. 



SIX WEEKS IN OUR ROCKIES. 205 

I have heard of and seen nothing in the shape of 
game, except some whitebodied, quacking geese, 
flurrying west. 

October 23^^. — Tho' the snow disappeared from 
Avoca and thereabouts on the 21st, it remained at 
Woodstock, thirty miles above, till last night; also 
on the road to St. Paul. I find it lies pretty thick at 
and about Kasota and all along the line to the Mis- 
sissippi. It is something like an ordinary snow in 
Kentucky, half-and-half snow and sunshine, little 
falling and melting soon. 

Eastern and Western "Valley of the Im- 
maculate." 

October 2']th — y:)th. — As we pass thro' Southern 
and Eastern Wisconsin the short meadows are green, 
like choice plots about the wooded region of Min- 
nesota. Some fine, tho' less frequent, lakes diversify 
the landscape, framing their mirror-bosoms in the 
rustic copses of the shores. We leave the rugged 
pineries and dalles and cataracts far towards the 
North and West, and glide over wooded prairies 
now. 

Madison, Wisconsin. 

I do not find the corn better, in many places, than 
on the Minnesota " Coteaux des prairies''' we have 
just left, until we approach the border country be- 
tween ' Wisconsin and Illinois. Here the staple 
grain seems, from the specimens we spy in passing, 
about of a similar quality and quantity per acre as 
on the wooded portions across the valley of the "Im- 
maculate Conception" — the old Catholic name for 
the Upper Mississippi. It will bear still further re- 



2o6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

petition, that the southeastern part of Wisconsin is 
very Hke its compeer's corresponding portions across 
the river in singular beauty and fertility. 

i\n Irish gentleman farmer has gone so far as to 
compare feature for feature of the soil, natural 
growth, land-lie^ etc., of Southeastern lovv^a v^^ith the 
best agricultural regions of the interior of England. 
Similarly, one might counterpart rural Belgium, the 
inland Rhine provinces, Alsace — any of the best and 
most picturesque prairie portions of Europe — in a 
random selection from the better lands in the prairie 
belt west of the Mississippi — in the country watered 
by the still greater Missouri and its tributaries — the 
Platte, Niobrara, James or Dakota. There are sim- 
ply no finer — scarcely as fine — lands in the wide 
world, as can be selected here by a mediocre judge. 
But it speaks for itself, this eastern valley of the "Im- 
maculate Conception," as we will persist in calling 
it, in spite of the seemingly hopeless fixing of the 
Indian-derived, but doubly corrupted name. 

Mississippi is neither the right Indian appellation, 
nor the original one given its waters by the pioneers, 
Hennepin, Marquette, LaSalle, LeSueur and their 
comrades. It takes observation to determine that, 
in fact, the Missouri is the "big" as well as the 
"Muddy Waters;" and that the Mississippi, of en- 
tirely diflferent character, is but its greatest north- 
ern tributary. This tributary is vindicated as the 
original discovery of the priests who named it for its 
amber-like limpidity, its green shores, and sweet 
islands, its now and again expanding lakes, as the 
river of the "Immaculate." 



six weeks in our rockies. zqf] 

Catholic Future of the American Prairies. 

Shall this omen, this constant tradition, be buried 
with the bones of the only half-immortalized Recol- 
lect, Hennepin — the but lately recognized Mar- 
quette.^ It behooves Catholics of Europe and Amer- 
ica — above all English-speaking Catholics — to con- 
tinue to answer this galling question by joining in 
the increasing chorus from Catholic throats, that are 
making the "Immaculate Conception Valley" ring 
with the acclaim: "Blest Mary shall be dowered 
anew with these beautiful and broad lands of hers, 
in bountiful compensation for the loss of her dowry 
in once Catholic England and Europe." Catholics 
shall so "possess the land" by the meek conquest of 
occupation and immigration into the western valley 
of the Mississippi, that every State and Territory in 
its imperial extent shall rejoice in an ever-expand- 
ing majority of the children of God and Blessed 
Mary Immaculate.* 

It is being done — the Church is extending her 
borders and widening her tent, more beautiful than 
the painted skins of Solomon's, in Minnesota and 
Iowa, Dakota and Montana, Nebraska and Kansas, 
Arkansas and Missouri, on to the Rocky Mountain 
States and Territories. Nay, we leap the grand 
Rockies and extend her glorious bounds from the 
"great river even unto the sea." Balboa, who feasted 
his eyes on the Pacific, but represents feebly the 
mighty multitude of Catholics who shall one day 
make the sea alone the boundary of the sweet con- 
quests of the Mother of Civilization, the only Church 
of the living God. 



* This practical work of the Colonization Association will be much ad- 
vanced by the Rev. J. J. Riordan at his post in Castle Garden, New York. 



20$ SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Nor will it be by mere rhapsodies — tho' enthusi- 
asm be the great prime mover of all great designs. 
Take the square of about a dozen States and Ter- 
ritories from the British to the southern line of Ken- 
tucky, Missouri, and westward to the Rocky Moun- 
tains, including, however. New Mexico. Bound its 
western limit by the Rockies and the east by the 
two greater lakes and the Indiana eastern boundary. 
And in this area of about 33 degrees, respectively, of 
latitude and longitude, you have in the valley of the 
Upper Mississippi, in this year of grace 1884, over 
3,000,000 Catholics, under four Archbishops, with 
eighteen suffragan Bishops and Vicars Apostolic, 
and two Coadjutors. These twenty-four Prelates are 
assisted by 2,600, near 3,700 priests, who serve 3,300 
to 3,300 churches and chapels. 

The schools of all grades, from the theological 
seminaries to the humble orphanages, number up- 
wards of 1,500, with 177,000 students and pupils, 
taught by over 4,400 religious and lay teachers. 
Most of these figures are only approximations — esti- 
mates more or less accurate, but not calculated to 
mislead into exaggeration. 

Continually inflowing tens of thousands up to 
hundreds of thousands of immigrants from abroad, 
and of migrators from the South and East, make 
accuracy almost impossible, but allow additions in- 
stead of subtractions. 

It needs no extraordinary talent of forecast to pre- 
dict what is being actually fulfilled before our eyes, 
that these dozen States, by the first decade of the 
twentieth century, will have swelled to sixteen or 
eighteen and sustain twelve, or at least ten millions 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 2O9 

more of people — near half of whom shall be chil- 
dren of the Church. The Apostolic Vicariates will 
have grown to Bishoprics — Bishoprics to Metropol- 
itan Sees. Kentucky, or more probably Indiana, on 
the east of the valley may compete with Minnesota 
or Nebraska on the west, for the next Archiepisco- 
pal Sees. Many new Sees are bound to follow the 
great influx of Catholics on all the prairie lands to 
the very roots of the Rockies and from Montana to 
Mexico, in proportion as the center of the whole 
population moves steadily and rapidly from the 
middle of the Ohio Valley towards the juncture of 
the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Our most 
Catholic cities on or near the Atlantic, the great 
Lakes and the Mississippi, are made the largest of 
the Union by their millions of Catholics, who con- 
sequently have not room to turn round in their tene- 
ments or in their churches. And these cities must 
give up their wanting poor and starving souls to 
freedom and plenty and salvation on the boundless 
prairies of God. The overcrowded, and conse- 
quently ill-served churches of the North Atlantic 
States must, perforce, send their surplus Catholics 
West, if they would save them from temporal and 
spiritual loss — not to say, damnation. There must 
come a crash if the eastern and western pans of the 
scales be not more equally trimmed. The West pos- 
sesses what the East desires — room and feed. 
Happy shall be the lot of the Church in her new 
conquests and gatherings of her multifarious chil- 
dren, if she but find ever the same zealous coadjutors 
to build up homes and altars for her dear ones! 
That she shall be equal to the task we have proof 



2IO SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

in the unprecedented increase of dioceses and arch- 
dioceses in Wisconsin, Michigan and IlUnois. See 
the corresponding increase of the Church's priests 
and people, crowding the shores of all the lakes of 
our northern line. Look across the Mississippi and 
see whether you do not recognize the new Chicagos, 
Milwaukees and Clevelands rising in the new West. 
Illinois and its northern neighbors do not much more 
than compete with the opposing States over the 
valley in temporals or spirituals. The child will soon 
be the equal of the parent — the State of yesterday 
with the State of the day before yesterday. 

Twenty-five miles north of Chicago you have but 
a model of what the environs of St. Paul and Min- 
neapolis and the twin cities of the Mississippi and 
the Missouri will become in a quarter of a century, 
more or less. 

The Twin City of the Upper Mississippi is already 
third in expenditure of wealth and increase of build- 
ings in the Union — either one of the pair, seventh in 
the long list of American cities. 

God bless! Mary extend her white hands over, 
these consecrated regions; give increase of the earth 
as it retards not in the road to heaven, and make 
this the chosen home of as many devoted millions 
as failing Europe, our crowded East and poorer 
South, can pour on the prairies! 



CONCLUSION 



Whence to Come — Where to Go. 

But there is another aspect of the comparison of 
the Eastern as put alongside the Western Valley of 
the Mississippi. It is the business aspect of finding 
better locations for homes, more room for farms, 
better farms — the many advantages of the West 
over the East, as a region to people w^ith those spe- 
cially having no good establishment where they are 
and possessing moderate means to start elsewhere. 
As to the persons themselves, no one is going to 
be so mad in this practical community of ours as to 
advocate wholesale, indiscriminate exoduses of the 
poorer and better-to-do classes, of malcontents, real- 
ly solid farmers, tradesmen — everybody to make up 
at once a Commonwealth complete. Selections 
(percentage) are all the East needs to give, and all the 
West cares to have, to make both better off. 

One by one, or at least, the society unit, family by 
family, is the oldest and best style for civilized peo- 
ple to emigrate and migrate, unless such peculiar cir- 
cumstances — such unbearable hardships of life, of 
Government or community hatred should make it 
reasonable for many to leave together and settle down 
again together. 

The Horace Greeleyan advice has some pith of 
wisdom in it. But he said cautiously, "I say — "as if 
afraid of his too great generality of invitation, even 



212 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

after being restricted to the "young man" class. If 
it was only relatively good then, it is less good now. 
The isolation and separation of sexes will cause 
as much dearth of women in the prairies as of men 
in the manufacturing districts of New England. 

The West wants indeed, at first, agriculturists — 
practical farmers, and more of them than she posses- 
ses. vStill, it is not such an anomaly to invite more 
city people, tradesmen, mechanics, and those who 
have no such settled occupation, to join with farm- 
ers and mingle among them, learn from them and 
become like them. Farming is easier West than 
East of the Mississippi, and our inventive genius has 
made knowledge common and once exclusive expe- 
rience the boon of the community. Nature favors 
machinery more in the West, and the unpracticed 
can learn to run machines where they would be 
long awkward at manual labor at the plough, hoe, 
axe-handle. Besides, too many youngsters have 
crowded the cities, and are trying to shirk labor 
by seeking clerkships, and find both spiritual and 
temporal loss in the midst of unaccustomed contami- 
nations. Fifteen years ago it was proven that the 
very great majority of those living in the country 
principally east of the Mississippi, were crowded, 
into about fifty cities. What is this but the country 
people wresting themselves from their legitimate 
occupations and usurping the places of townpeople? 
The balance must be restored by giving back these 
crowded millions to their God -given and once pos- 
sessed freedom — health, home, faith — by transferring 
them back to their native occupations. It is only 
trimming the scales by restoration of equal weights, 
of accustomed weights. 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 213 

The rural population ought to exceed the urban — 
the country at large to contain much more than often 
badly-selected sites to crowd millions into and crush 
the life and energy out of them, make machines of 
them for selfish purposes, for monopoly, for the 
glutted few — the aristocrats among us who are 
becoming nobles too fast, and have too many vas- 
sals. We want no oligarchies, and we shall go on 
creating them, or bolstering up still more the ones 
already in power, and disposed to use their power, 
even against the will of Legislatures and Senates? 
We want Catholics especially to be freed from tram- 
mels and vassalage, filth and consequent endemics 
and epidemics, elbowing and discontent. We want 
broader fields for their ambition, greater aims for 
their designs, better and farther-reaching results 
from their hard labors. The ground faces of the 
poor must be uplifted and look abroad on plenty; 
the worked-down must have some content of life, 
and not curse the day in which they were born. A 
time will come after the communities in the West 
grow larger and more comprehensive of all that is ne- 
cessary for a good civil life and temporal prosperity, 
when we can invite with more confidence the poorer, 
the worse- provided classes of our brethren to sit 
down at the board of plenty in the household of 
faith built up in the glorious West. We do now re- 
strict invitations to those who are not perhaps suf- 
fering worst in the built-up and overcrowded cities, 
simply because the poorest are shiftless when thrown 
entirely on their own resources, and would not only 
suffer more, probably, when left to make a subsistence 
on the prairies than in the city, but would be a burden 



214 ^^^ SEASONvS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

on those who are not uncharitable so much as they 
are unable to stretch their hands in relief, for a few 
years, beyond their own thresholds, and have to feed 
the mouths more dependent upon them. 

But the time of the poorer shall come, and it shall 
come the more quickly by those just above them 
leaving the poorer their places by moving West, 
and giving the same a chance to rise to some industry, 
self-dependence and energy of practical work before 
they expose themselves to the hardships they would 
not survive. Where, next, ought people to come 
from inside our United States, and to what spots 
ought they to migrate to furnish those prairies of 
ours with their proportion of population and rendei 
them the granary of the world? No man can speci- 
fy where they should not come from, provided 
always the individual families are not well estab- 
lished and have means to move. Not to be too 
general, however, a letter of August, 1880, (private, 
but tacitly left free to publish) from Rt. Rev. John 
L. Spalding, of Peoria, opens both sides of the 
practical questions by determining as follows: 
"Nebraska and Dakota are the best points in the 
United States for settlers. Several new railroads 
are building into Dakota, and homesteads of 160 
acres can be had very near the depots. There is a 
great rush for these lands, and our good Kentucky 
Catholics will wait until they are all gone. Dakota 
has a fine climate and excellent soil. There are 
Catholic settlements in Kentucky where the soil was 
never good and is now worthless." * * * These 
predictions have been fulfilled, and the choice shown 
good. Since the middle of '80 the eftorts of the 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 215 

Colonization Associations have been directed success- 
fully to the obtaining of lands for Catholic settle- 
ments in one of these two regions, and the many 
others south to the Gulf, commented on twice or 
thrice in these pages. The recent wise appointment 
of Rev. J. J. Riordan, of St. Peter's, N. Y., now at 
his self-sacrificing post at Castle Garden, will speed 
the practical working of the settlements, both for 
immigrants and migrators in the West. I have 
heard the colonization authorities often assert that 
the railroad lands in Minnesota have about all, if not 
quite all, been taken up, and you can now, outside 
the general offers of the colony agents, only watch 
your chances for obtaining choice spots from the 
scattered dissatisfied or the non-Catholics in the 
vicinity of Catholic settlements, who want to sell 
out and go farther. The other States and territories 
have plenty of room for fine selections, to please all 
tastes and judgments — from the very warm to the 
much colder climates, and with soil of almost the 
identical formation in all our latitudes. 

The prospector ought to look for and inspect the 
desiderated locations for himself and those intimately 
interested; for, good and less good, tolerable and 
proximately useless lie side by side, in these as in all 
other farming and grazing sections. And when 
he shall have definitely chosen, he may congratulate 
or blame himself first and last, and not be necessi- 
tated to fall back on vituperation or praise of those 
from whom he has obtained general or particular in- 
vitations. No one knows exactly what may fit an- 
other in land any more than he can judge precisely 
what will fit another in a hat. 

Finally, as to where to move from? 



2l6 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

The episcopal remark about the thinness and the 
present iiselessness of certain regions in Kentucky 
can be verified to the letter. The vState has so long 
been settled and picked over, tho' sparsely populated 
and never invitingly opened to immigrants, that the 
great majority of farming sections have already got- 
ten into the hands of tight-grip owners who will not 
part with their holdings under a high consideration. 

A large section of the Bluegrass region w^as once 
largely in the hands of Catholics — and now, in the 
district of Georgetown and White Sulphur, for 
instance, but from three to five names of the old 
Catholic settlers can be found opposite these mag- 
nificent lands in the assessor's books. 

About Lebanon in Marion, Bardstown in Nelson, 
Springfield in Washington, many well-to-do Catho- 
lics of the old Maryland stock are scattered among 
many more non-Catholics; and great portions of the 
country are rocky or worn, and contain nothing 
like what ought to be, by this time, the thousands 
of children of the original sixty families of the 
famous league of emigrants from St. Mary's, and the 
shores of the Chesapeake, and descendants of later 
comers. The older settlers, again, in Breckinridge 
and lower Daviess Counties are comparatively com- 
fortable in comparison with their fathers, but have 
yet to grub in only tolerably productive soil- for their 
now-accounted short crops of corn and tobacco. 
Breckinridge, especially, the old "Bracks in the 
Ridges," is true to its name, and is rather more 
inclined to mountainous than hilly. The newer set- 
tlers among Catholics have gotten poor lands, and 
'.vear out their fingers' ends moiling in the rugged 



SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 217 

ridges and the rougher forests for often but a bare 
subsistence. Who would blame many from wishing 
to better their condition by migration? 

Our Ohio River-bottom farms, on both shores, 
are among our most valuable for grain production, 
but have so often, of late years, been subject to over- 
flows, that they invite cultivation by their richness, 
and repel by the manifold chances of seeing the farm 
produce, cattle, houses and all swept down to the 
Mississippi. Besides, except in Union and the 
borders of Daviess and Henderson Counties, the 
better locations are not possessed by or salable to 
other than wealthy Catholics. 

Those indeed of our Kentucky farmers who have 
moved to Missouri on the bottoms of the Mississippi 
have not fared much better, being often ruined by 
disastrous overflows as frequent as ours. As to 
Illinois and Indiana the inference is obvious that their 
Ohio river boundary lands, of very much the same 
fertility as the opposing Kentucky shores, are the 
victims of the same watery destroyer, tho' no one dis- 
putes the safer fertility of back-lying farms. A great 
— perhaps the greatest — corn and railroad State is the 
"country of the Illinois;" but it is so surrounded and 
run over by water in its lower lying portions, and 
even on the flatter prairies, that it takes considerable 
expense to make its prolific soil yield its full comple- 
ment. One who has traveled much in, for instance, 
the belt between Watseka on the east and Henne- 
pin on the west, after thanking God, turns to con- 
gratulate man on the invention of the ubiquitous, 
ever-crossing and re-crossing railroads — they are 
nearly the only mode of locomotion in parts of the 
year. 



2l8 SIX SEASONS ON OUR PRAIRIES. 

Lower middle Indiana, to judge from what one 
can see from repeated transits by rail, seems produc- 
tive enough as far north as Indianapolis; but the 
higher in latitude you ascend the more unpopulated — 
if not depopulated — the prospect appears; and the 
land seems to yield little beyond scrub-oak and 
sparse w^eeds, until you touch the counties border- 
ing on Michigan. Thousands have moved from 
these, and the Indiana and Wisconsin prairies on 
west. No one who has traveled along the boundary 
lines of Illinois and Indiana can speak well of 
what he can see from the trains. It is one of the 
most uninteresting and apparently hopeless regions 
on the whole prairie east of the "Great Waters" for 
farming purposes. Michigan will scarcely come 
into our count; Wisconsin farms, tho', may, and 
stand fair in comparison of either their western or 
southern neighbors — at least in the parts south from 
a line drawn from the St. Croix river opposite St. 
Paul to a point above Milwaukee. 

Most of these States, indeed, have other and for 
them much more profitable outlooks in their coals, 
timber and minerals, as Kentucky and Michigan; in 
their manufactories and pineries as, respectively, 
Wisconsin and Illinois. But it may be said broadly 
that none of them will finally yield the same riches 
in grain and general pasturing, and must turn to 
riches of another source before they will, in the long 
run, compare favorably with the "Golden West." 



CODSTTEZSTTS. 



DEDICATED TO OUR LADY IMMACULATE. 



Paee 
MINNESOTA. 

A Prefatory May 7 

Graceville, named after Rt. 

Rev.Thos. L. Grace, O. P., 

Bishop of St. Paul 10 

Swift Co 10 

DIARY OF SEASONS,iS83, 13-123 

Avoca 13 

White Bear Lake 15 

John Ruskin, 18 

Prairie Sunday 21 

Prairie Birds .' 22 

The Little Sleeper of Avoca.. 23 
Nuns of the Holy Child 26, 35, 

50. 57, 1 18. 
British Importations into the 

Canadian Northwest 28 

Letter to "Boston Pilot" 28 

Most Rev. Archbishop Lynch. 34 

Mr. }no Sweetman 12, 35, 74 

Prairie Hymns to St. Rose. 36, 63 
Three Winters in Murray Co. 38 
lona, " Home of the Sacred 

Heart" 40 

Adrian, NoblesT| Co 42 

Austrian Colonists 45 

Letter to ''New York Free- 
man's Journal" 52 

Domestic Teaching in Nuns' 

School 60 

Fourth of July at Fulda, 18S3. 69 
Rt. Rev. Jno. Ireland, D. D.. 70 

Prairie Drunkards 72 

St Paul and Minneapolis 82 

Southeastern Minnesota 83 

Lake Minnetonka 85 

Minnesota's Summer Clime. 98 

Dalles of the St. Croix 08 

DAKOTA AND IOWA 103 

Flandreau, Dak 104 

Sioux Falls 107 

Yankton, Dak .109 

Bishop Brondel — Rt. Rev. 

Martin Marty, O. S. D no 

Northern Iowa no 

Prairies and Plains to the 

Rockies , 112 

N. Pacific Railroad— Dakota 

—Montana 114-116 

Items General on Prairies 114 

NEBRASKA nj 

Council Bluffs and Omaha 112 

Lincoln— Mr John Fitzgerald 117 

Towns on the Platte 117 

Rt. Rev, Jas, O'Connor, D. D.iiS 



Page 

Lands in Greeley County no 

Fr. S. Byrne, O . P., and Bay- 
ard Taylor 122 

Nym Crinkle's "Iron Trail". 122 
DIARY OF SIX WEEKS IN 

OURROCKIES J25 

Towns and Herds on the 

Plains 128 

WYOMING TERRITORY.... 129 

Cheyenne 120 

COLORADO 13b 

Central City 131 

Items Religious and Profane 
on the Rocky Mountains — 
Colorado — Idaho — Montana 

—Mexico— N. Mexico 132 

Georgetown i^e 

Green Lake of the Rockies... .139 

A Songofthe Mountains 141 

"Heigh ho! For the Mount- 
ains" i^e 

Berthoud Pass 148 

Middle Park 145 

Cowboys and Gentler Folk. ...149 

Camp in Frazer Valley 152 

A Cowboy "Codded" 157 

A Deer-Capital Prize 160 

Grand Lake, Col i6c 

A Fortnight Afoot 16S 

The"Rococo"and Ptarmigan. 170 

Rocky Pencilings 170 

DIARY OF SIX SEASONS 

RESUMED 181 

Fulda, Minn 182 

Currie, Minn., Church Dedi- 
cated— Rt. Rev J. L. Spald- 
ing, D. D 183 

Ten Days at Buffalo Lake — 
Residence of Mr. John 

Sweetman 184 

Prairie and Tame Grasses 187 

Fall Crop Reports 190 

Prairie October iq^ 

Nuns of the Holy Child's 
Semi-Annual Examination. 195 

Prairie Indian Summer 199 

Tricks on Travelers 201 

EASTERN AND WESTERN 
"VALLEY OF THE IMMAC- 
ULATE" 205 

Catholic Future of ourPrairies 207 

Rev. J. J. Riordan 207 

Whence to Come— Where to 

Go 2U 



BY THE SAME' AUTHOR: 



THE JUDGES OF FAITH 

VS. 

Godless Schools, 

The evidence of nearly 300 Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops in 
the past 50 years, all over the world, against secular State 
Schools, especially the testimony of over 50 Archbishops and 
Bishops of the United States condemning the unchristian 
character of the Public Schools. 

A work encouraged before publication by a number of 
American Bishops, and cordially endorsed by his Grace. Arch- 
bishop Gibbons, of Baltimore, Bishop O'Farrell, of Trenton, 
N. J., and others. Addressed to CATHOLIC PARENTS. 
PUBLISHED BY 

THOMAS D. EGAN, Catholic Agency, 

42 Barclay St., New York, N. Y. 

For sale by him and Catholic Booksellers. Single copy, 25 
cents; $18 a hundred; $2.50 a dozen. 

A LIMITED LOT ON SALE BY 

CHAS A. ROGERS, 

IBS & 1E7 Ulest Jeffersan Street, LauisnUe, Ky. 

IMPORTER, STATIONER, 

AND DEALER IN 

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